Concha Velasco: from the ye-yé girl to Teresa de Jesús

Conchita Velasco, with the diminutive, lasted until 1980, when the interpreter had already done everything in Spanish cinema. The protagonist of ‘The Girls of the Red Cross’, her first big popular success in 1958, fell and got up many times. In the 60s and 70s she filmed up to seven films a year, while she filled theaters. After two failed Goya nominations in 1989 for ‘Esquilache’ and in 1996 for ‘Beyond the Garden’, the Goya of Honor in 2012 settled the debt of Spanish cinema with an actress who has always been there.

Conchita Velasco was a single mother at a time when she represented “the image of a modern but honest girl, friendly and not clumsy, modest, mischievous, with common sense and respectful of order; that is, a perfect girlfriend,” as summarized in the ‘Dictionary of Spanish Cinema’ directed by José Luis Borau. ‘The Girls of the Red Cross’, ‘Valentine’s Day’, ‘The Cheaters’… Classics from the program ‘Cine de barrio’, which its protagonist presented for almost a decade after replacing another national glory, Carmen Sevilla. Of all his ‘partners’, Velasco kept two: Tony Leblanc, “a friend to whom I owe everything”, and Manolo Escobar: “The five films we made together are on par with those of Katharine Hepburn with Spencer Tracy », he defended.

That popular dimension of Velasco, meat of the gossip magazines for always, has perhaps eclipsed the artistic merits of a ductile and disciplined actress, who has known how to reinvent herself on the big screen throughout a career that exceeds a hundred titles during 65 years old: in 2020 she played a role in ‘Malasaña 32’ and concluded her participation as Doña Carmen in 37 episodes of ‘Las Chicas del Cable’. In front of a camera until the last moment.

Brando’s strategy

‘Once a year, being a hippy doesn’t hurt’, ‘Juicio de skirts’, ‘The ladies in bad company’… Concha Velasco was the first to admit that she had made bad films to pay for the theatrical adventures that, thanks to her husband Paco Marsó, they ruined her by forcing her to accept any role. Her great friend Pedro Olea has been, without a doubt, one of the directors who has gotten the most out of the actress in titles like ‘Tormento’, ‘Pim, pam, pum… fire’ and ‘Beyond the garden’ ‘.

“Concha has been the best and most complete actress that Spanish cinema has ever had,” praises the Bilbao director, who in ‘Tormento’ surprised her by imitating Marlon Brando’s strategy in ‘The Godfather’, putting cotton balls in her mouth to speak gibberish. . «I can boast of having worked with the best actors. Neither López Vázquez, nor Sacristán, nor Landa nor Concha have been Method actors, who later took the character home. They were not people who wanted to appear to be actors, but rather theirs was a pure vocation,” says Pedro Olea, the first filmmaker who dared to demand that Velasco take ten takes to film a shot in ‘Tormento’.

The legendary ye-yé girl from ‘Television Stories’, the involuntary leader of the first actors’ strike in this country that closed theaters and stopped film and television filming in 1975, knew how to be a flesh-and-blood Teresa of Jesús in the series that Josefina Molina directed in the 80s, a showgirl battered by life in ‘Pim, pam, pum… fire!’ and a horny one in ‘Paris-Timbuktu’, where Luis García Berlanga finally had the pleasure of undressing her.

Concha Velasco, who bought an Edelweiss refrigerator from her parents with her salary in ‘The Girls of the Red Cross’, was left with the image of Charlton Heston collecting pieces of decoration for his fireplace in La Moraleja. And she swore that she was never going to be an ant, but rather a generous and sincere grasshopper, on and off the sets.