Maruja Torres She was born in 1943 and, since then, she has tried to stay alive, write a lot and do everything in journalism, and publish a few books, between novels and autofiction—even winning awards. Planet and Nadal—. In his own words, he got as far as he could by doing what he knew best: pay close attention. And all this without having set foot in a university or a journalism school. “Since there were no fights in my house, I rarely went to school,” the author once said, who is the daughter of a waiter and a dressmaker and grew up in the heart of Barcelona’s ‘Chinatown’.
As a child, Maruja read everything that had letters, from comics to Dickenspassing through the pink novel author Corín Tellado. And at the age of 14 she met Terenci Moix, who, in addition to lending her books, introduced her to his friends and helped her clarify her ideas after confessing that I wanted to dedicate myself to writing. Also at that age, in need of a job to help at home, she began to learn shorthand typing and accounting notions in a night academy, to end up confined to an office.
When he was 20 years old, he wrote a letter to The Pressone of the Movement’s newspapers, which offered her to work in the offices and run the women’s page. Already then she declared herself an admirer of Elisenda Nadal, soul of the famous magazine Framesfounded by her parents, María Fernanda Gañán and Antonio Nadal-Rodó, who also owned the women’s weekly Garbo, so she decided to make it an interview, “as well written and witty as I could make it”hoping that he would notice her and hire her.
His plan worked and, for a time, he dedicated himself to writing articles and interviews in Frameswhere he would forge himself as an all-terrain journalist. “What I liked most about my work in Framesbecause it made me feel like the pilgrim who had gone to the movies as a child, it was covering festivals and writing film diaries“he once noted.
“None of the first were missing, but let no one get their hopes up: they were developed in Barcelona, Molins de Rey or Sitgesand they consisted more than anything of samples of cinema that we could not see commercially, in screenings approved by the censors because they were within the reach of a minority audience, and which I attended like someone who goes to mass, in my capacity as a cinephile: yes, furthermore , he wrote about it, better than better.
On another occasion he explained that in Frames they had a “very casual” style: “We let our hair down a lot, we were Terenci Moix, Rosa Montero, Sol Alameda, Vicente Molina Foix,… And, furthermore, I collaborated on Please, daily world, Front page…Franco died and there was barbaric euphoria […]. Two years after Franco’s death, all the press that was doing well during the transition were left without an audience: they closed daily worldhill Pleasehill Front page, Frames It became monthly… There was a brutal drop in publications. And in Barcelona, where I was so comfortable, I was left without a job.”
From its beginnings in Madrid
There the then director of Soonmagazine in which he had the opportunity to start “writing without signing pure rubbish”. Among other things, he wrote the memoirs of Carolina de Monaco in the first person. And when he produced another serial for the magazine, this time about the dramatic existence of the actress Romy Schneider He thought, “We’ve come this far,” and got up from his chair.
He left the newsroom and took the bus, where he met his colleague José Martí Gómezto whom he told that he wanted to go to Madrid to try his luck. “Go ahead. Good reporters will always be necessary,” he told her, and those words gave her the definitive push to leave Barcelona.
“I screamed, a disgusting guy came to my house and I sold him the television and a camera for sixty thousand pelas, and with this money I grabbed my little suitcase and left for Madrid,” he would later say about it. “Rosa Montero directed the ‘colorín’ of The Country and I said to myself, well, at least one report a month I will settle, and I began to live in friends’ houses, without a penny and at thirty-six years old. It was a bit scary, starting from scratch completely. But well, I found Roman Gubernwho offered me to work with him on television, in a film program. they paid me one hundred thousand pesetas a monthI got an apartment and then, a year later, they made me permanent in The Country“.
For years, Maruja dedicated herself to practicing as special envoy on war footing, writing columns and doing social chroniclein an ironic key for a medium, The Countrywhich he decided to leave in 2013, after the director, Javier Moreno, will throw her out of Opinion.
“I have criticized several times the reconversion from the newspaper The Country since it was a center-left publication when it was founded, in a instrument of the liberal right“, then wrote the journalist, who was later collaborating with eldiario.esfrom where he left to retire happily and dedicate yourself to reading.
The movies I wish I lived in
His signing for todayin the SER Chainand his appearance on Jordi Évole’s program, almost two years ago, gave him a second youth and brought his figure closer to a whole new generation. Now the book has just been published The more people die, the more I want to live (Today’s Topics)a kind of living will in which, In addition to reviewing his life, he pays tribute to cinematographyan industry he knows very well because, among other things, he wrote the script for The king of mambo (1989), a comedy by the Valencian Carles Mira in which he also had a cameo.
In a promotional interview, he assured that he will also have a fleeting appearance in the series. your majesty (2025), directed by Borja Cobeaga and Ginesta Guindal, where she plays a prestigious journalist who interviews an elusive prince.
“Cinema was an immeasurable open door for young people who, in the sixties, suffered from cultural drought of Francoism“, he points out in the pages of his essay. “Even with cuts, censored or because they were not allowed to be shown, and we could only read about them and complain as best we could, the movies provided us with the adrenaline necessary to be happy despite the squalor of the time.
Eli, who I worked for when he converted New Frames in a color magazine, modern and with as much glamor as we could afford, she is another great cinephile, needless to say, with whom I like to have long telephone conversations in which we always remember movies, anecdotes, beloved characters from Spanish or international cinema“.
In one of the chapters of the book he lists some of the films in which he would like to live and film subjects that he would like to do after directing it. Like, for example, spending eternity “under the dome of the Los Angeles planetarium, like Nathalie Wood in Rebel without a cause“, surrounded by her friends, but without nerves.
EITHER fire john wayne “from the doorway to the desert and its most famous centaurs from John Ford’s cinema”, and from the seventh art in general. Or “spend infinity in the vest of Gregory Pecknear his chain watch”, in that masterpiece entitled to kill a mockingbird.
“It may seem like too many wishes, but eternity is so long that it admits the consolation of thinking about it cinematically to increase the quality of dying“she clarifies.”There is no better pain reliever than good cinema and, consequently, it can also be a better life saver. Continue existing on screen, in scenes or in frames scattered throughout the universe. With the chosen family. People of life. People of the cinema”.
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