Carmen Maura Talks Almodóvar and Baring All in Her Venice Title 'Calle Málaga'

For more than four decades, Carmen Maura has been one of Spanish cinema’s defining voices — and faces. Emerging from Madrid’s theatre scene in the turbulent years after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, she became a central figure of Madrid’s countercultural movement the Movida Madrileña, which is where she met an aspiring filmmaker named Pedro Almodóvar (he had a bit part part in one of the plays she was working on). Almodóvar would eventually cast her in his first feature films, where she brought a mix of wit, edge and emotional precision to wild early works like Dark Habits (1983, What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984) and Matador (1986). Then came a global success: the Oscar-nominated Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988. Conflict on the set of Breakdown