Carmen Sevilla, from the Taming of the Shrew to ‘Telecupón’

There’s a lot carmen sevilla (1930-2023), and of course they are all the same. She will more or less like what she did, but the Sevillian woman was always quite consistent in times of cultural rickety and in moments of greater splendor. We will remember her as the wife of Augusto Algueró (her first husband of hers), in one of the most publicized ‘pop’ weddings of the 1960s, held on February 23, 1961 in the Zaragoza basilica of El Pilar. Also because of her advertisements and television appearances, with those lapses in front of the camera that marked style, and that she knew how to make profitable with such grace, and those comments about ‘her little sheep’ when she was the presenter of the ‘Telecupón’. A little less because of her musical vision and that presence of hers that made her something like a flamenco ye-yé. And much more because of her irregular film career, like that of all the actresses and actors who worked for so many years under Franco’s yoke, but full of very interesting moments.

Two people were extremely important at the beginning of his artistic career, his father Antonio Garcia Padilla, composer and lyricist, collaborator of Manuel Quiroga, Miguel de Molina and Imperio Argentina; and little star castro, the star of the copla, which gave him the alternative as a singer. There is a third name Jorge Negrete, the Mexican Charro singer, with whom he formed a partner in the co-production ‘Jalisco canta en Sevilla’ (1949). The success of this musical comedy with a Sevillian setting and songs from Jalisco turned Seville into a little star when she was not even 20 years old.

It was his second film and roles began to follow as a couple of the male star on duty in comedies and musical films of the 50s. He almost always looked like vivacious young gypsy who dazzled with his presence, voice and self-confidence in ‘La guitarra de Gardel’, ‘Filigrana’ –with Concha Piquer–, ‘Cuentos de la Alhambra’, ‘La revoltosa’ and the films he made with the Spanish tenor Luis Mariano: ‘ El sueño de Andalucía’, ‘Imperial Violets’ –a new version of the silent film starring Raquel Meller– and ‘La bella de Cádiz’.

At this time he already appeared in one of the series B co-productions between the United States and Spain, ‘Baghdad Girls’ (1953), opposite Paulette Godard and Gypsy Rose Lee. She worked in Mexico without abandoning the most folkloric image: ‘Gypsy you had to be’ and, under the orders of Emilio ‘Indio’ Fernández, ‘Reportage’. Benito Perojo recruited her for one of the hits of the time, ‘Sister Saint Sulpice’and for the particular Andalusian review of a Shakespearean classic, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. She starred in a curious thriller shot by Don Siegel (the director of ‘Dirty Harry’) in Spain in 1958, ‘An Adventure for Two’. That same year he did one of his best works in ‘La venganza’, a Juan Antonio Bardem film massacred by censorship. And when producer Samuel Bronston and director Nicholas Ray settled near Madrid to shoot their particular vision of the life of Jesus Christ, ‘King of Kings’ (1961), Seville was chosen to play Mary Magdalene.

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The 1960s were worse, as were the films of Concha Velasco, José Sacristán, Alfredo Landa or José Luis López Vázquez, in total servitude to Francoist cinema. In 1971 a singular film of Eloy de la Iglesia Which gave you a registry change: ‘The glass ceiling’, in which she played a young woman who feels harassed by an invisible enemy in her own home. It was a mirage. Titles such as ‘Virgin wax’, ‘Sleep and flirt, everything is just beginning’, ‘Sex or no sex’ or ‘Naked therapy’ followed. They were the cinematographic times of the uncovering, with which the image of the actress did not marry. There were exceptions: a role in ‘Marco Antonio y Cleopatra’ (1972), filmed by Charlton Heston in Almería and Aranjuez, and, above all, ‘It is not good that the man is alone’ (1973), a film by Pedro Olea centered on a fairly liberated woman and a lonely man, played by López Vázquez, who has turned a doll into his wife.

At the end of the 90s, he left cinema and television, although he returned to the small screen presenting the first seasons of the program. ‘neighborhood cinema’. In 2009 he was diagnosed alzheimer. Half a century earlier she had been considered the bride of Spain.

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