Cecilia Roth: Woman on the Verge of a (U.S.) Breakthrough

“I just love to take pictures,” actress Cecilia Roth purred in a smoky voice as she flirted with the photographer’s lens. As she smiled, her big blue eyes widened, not in an ingenue manner, but with the assured sexiness of a woman in her 40s who has spent half of her life in the camera’s eye.

Though European and Latin American audiences are familiar with her image on screen, American moviegoers likely have never seen her perform until now. As Manuela, the lead role in the Pedro Almodovar film “All About My Mother,” Roth plays the friend/mother/confidante of a diverse consort of women in the all-female cast.

Fourteen years had passed since Almodovar and Roth last worked together. In those early days, making “Labyrinth of Passion” in 1982 and “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” in 1984, Roth recalls the curious glances from the Spanish film establishment at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Both of them were young, trying to find their footing in a stodgy film industry whose clique of directors viewed them as party crashers--Almodovar seemed like a colorful maniac sitting down to an elegant but stuffy dinner party.

Roth said she knew even at the time that Almodovar and she would make more movies together.

“There is a common code between us,” she said, speaking in Spanish in an interview in West Hollywood. “We are cards from the same deck. He was very close to me when I filmed “Martin (Hache),” and when I won the Goya [Spain’s Oscar], he was very proud.”

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Indeed, it was Roth’s performance in the critically acclaimed 1997 film “Martin (Hache),” directed by Adolfo Aristarain, that convinced Almodovar she had the emotional depth and acting ability to play Manuela. In the film, Roth played the lover of a man who must care for his ailing son.

“I just really loved her in the last two films she did,” said Almodovar recently in Los Angeles. “She had really matured as a dramatic actress. She brought a level of sobriety and sincerity and an almost unbearable pain to the character of Manuela.”

Almodovar was finishing up the script for “All About My Mother” at a friend’s home in Brazil--singer Caetano Veloso--when he phoned Roth in Argentina. He visualized Roth, a petite woman with a strong personality, as the perfect actress to portray Manuela, a woman of steely resolve and almost unbelievable ability to carry forward in the face of tragedy.

It didn’t take much convincing for Roth to accept the part.

“It was such a surprise on the one hand, but on the other I knew that the inevitable had happened,” she said.

The film’s story focuses on the lives of transvestites, transsexuals, a pregnant nun who contracts AIDS from her transsexual lover, an aging lesbian movie star and her strung-out lover, and Roth, a heterosexual nurse whose son dies in a car accident. A world, in other words, in which the usual rules do not apply.

“She worked with her intuition as her base,” said the director. “I rarely had to explain the part to her. She understood immediately what I wanted.”

What amazed Roth about the story was Almodovar’s ability to pull a heartbreaking humanity out of all the characters, despite their freakishness and unbearable circumstances.

When Almodovar rehearsed the script with his four protagonists--Marisa Paredes, Penelope Cruz, Candela Pena and Roth--he made it clear that the acting needed to be controlled. He read the entire script in a four-hour reading session, ending with all the women sobbing.

Roth said all of the actors understood the need to keep the acting controlled.

“The script is very baroque, but it was clear to all of us that our acting had to be subdued,” she said. “We had to transcend the drama and act with gestures, and subtlety. Otherwise the film would not have had its strength and depth.”

The hardship all these women face binds them together. It is not only a feminine story but also feminist in the sense that all of the women take charge of their futures and support each other through their pain.

“I was so gratified to have such a rich and generous character--to play someone who was so hurt, and yet so full of love and openness,” said Roth.

The story resonated deeply with Roth because she and her companion of 14 years, Argentine rock star Fito Paez, have recently adopted a little boy. “I always asked myself: Where would Manuela’s love be directed now that her son was gone?” she said.

Roth’s arrival in film began as a teenager in Madrid. Her family fled Argentina after the military coup of 1976, fearing for their lives. Roth’s father, Abrasha Roth, was editor of a large Buenos Aires newspaper, one of many targets for the right-wing military dictatorship that took power. So, Roth gradually made a life for herself in Spain. It was at first painful.

“My first night in Madrid I cried in my pillow until it was sopping wet,” she said. “Then I realized that I had to move forward and to look at my life in a positive light.”

Move forward she did, relishing the freedom Spaniards were experiencing after the death of their own dictator, Francisco Franco. Roth began acting in television and film at 18. By 20, she starred in “Arrebato,” a cult classic directed by Ivan Zulueta. It turned out to be a turning point in her life and career.

“It was like being in a state of grace during the filming of that movie,” she said. “Through acting and film, I felt that my life had a sense to it. I felt I had a mission.” She has worked steadily ever since, filming in Spain, France, Italy, Mexico and Argentina. She has not ruled out working on a project in Hollywood, though she has no interest in big studio blockbuster fare. She is set to star next in an offbeat Argentine film by director Alejandro Agresti called “One Night With Sabrina Love,” the story of a porn star.

But perhaps no other film has given her the same experience as “All About My Mother,” which likely will be Spain’s official entry for the foreign-language Oscar. She has seen the film more than a half a dozen times, all over the world, and yet each time it engrosses her. It’s almost like she is an audience member, not the leading actress of the film, she said.

“It’s almost as if the film has a life of its own,” she said.