Spanish actress Amparo Larrañaga has returned to the Madrid stage in "Victoria" at the Teatro Fígaro, telling LA RAZÓN about her family's long acting dynasty and her frustration with the country's current leaders.
Her family tree reads like a history of Spanish theatre. Her grandfather was actor Ismael Merlo, her father was Carlos Larrañaga, her mother is actress María Luisa Merlo, her brother is actor Luis Merlo, her aunt was actress Amparo Rivelles, and her grandmother was actress María Fernanda Ladrón de Guevara.
Despite that lineage, Larrañaga said she was such a poor actress at her stage debut at age 15 that she did not even know how to properly play dead, and had to be given an umbrella as a prop simply to stop her from moving her hands so much.
She said her grandfather Ismael was responsible for pushing her into acting, even though she had wanted to become a doctor or a nurse. Hereditary talent looks wonderful in family trees and obituaries, she said, but once the lights go down and the audience arrives, no ancestor can perform the lines for you.
Nearly 50 years on stage
Almost half a century after that first performance, Larrañaga said theatre does not accumulate loyalty. However good an actor was the night before, she said, tonight the stage has to be won over again, calling it the magic of live performance.
She acknowledged that her surname helps open doors more quickly, but said keeping them from closing again is another matter entirely. A surname can secure an audition, she said, but not fifty years of a career.
The plot of Victoria
In "Victoria," Larrañaga plays Mónica, a character reappearing after the earlier play "Laponia." The children in the story have grown up, and one of them is now a teenager with a promising career as a footballer and the inconvenient intention of deciding his own future for himself. Larrañaga said she has two children of her own and knows well the moment when children leave and a parent has to step back from their lives.
Grieving her father on stage
She said she does not consider theatre exactly a form of therapy, although she once cried on stage over the death of her father, Carlos Larrañaga, in 2012 at the age of 75. Carlos Larrañaga was one of the great leading men of Spanish acting, known for his voice, his elegance and his charm. Larrañaga said that for her, it was simply her father who died. She said she inherited many things from him, but not his way of living in the present, since he lived day to day.
The women who shaped her
Speaking about her mother, María Luisa Merlo, Larrañaga described her as survival, temperament and work, a woman with decades of theatre and television behind her, along with marriages, separations, hardships and reinventions, all while keeping her joy intact.
She said the men in her family were great actors, but the women had to be pioneers as well. She recalled family stories, including a grandmother who was jailed for being divorced, at a time in Spain when women were granted dignity only as long as they did not exercise too much freedom.
Criticism of Spain's leaders
Larrañaga said she grew up surrounded by these women and dislikes conformism, along with the habit of getting worked up at the dinner table, in a bar or in a WhatsApp group, only to go quietly back home afterward. She recalled a society once more willing to protest, demonstrate and cause discomfort.
Turning to Spain's current leaders, she said that if the people in charge are not up to the job, they should go home now.
Nearly fifty years after that first performance, Larrañaga said she now knows what to do with her hands and no longer needs an umbrella. All she needs now, she said, is to raise the curtain.
