María Casares was not afraid of anything and was always betting on life. She was a “privileged resident” in France and “born” in a Parisian theater when she was twenty years old. It was made of Atlantic foam and Galician soil. His feline gaze crossed wars and exiles until it sneaked into the collective imagination of millions of French people, occupying the covers of magazines and billboards in theaters and cinemas.
He lived his “great encounter”, passionate and clandestine, with the existentialist Albert Camus, a relationship rocked between patience and desire. A free woman, symbol of the republican exiles, who only returned to Spain after Franco’s death, to shine with a work by Rafael Alberti.
“My homeland is the theater”
María Casares was born in La Coruña on November 21, 1922. She was the daughter of Santiago Casares Quiroga, a politician and lawyer who would become president of the Council of Ministers during the Second Republic until his resignation in July 1936, after the military uprising.
Casares Quiroga’s political career caused the whole family to move to Madrid in 1931. It was a traumatic experience. “I felt the exile from Galicia to Madrid more than that from Spain to France”, he will tell in Privileged resident, his memoir. In the capital, the young woman receives an avant-garde training, in contact with the elites of the Republic. These are years in which his passion for theater began to be forged.
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The start of the Civil War makes María Casares an exile. “My homeland is the theater and my country of origin, the refugee Spain.” Together with his mother, he left Madrid at the age of fourteen to settle in the French capital in November 1936.
With the fall of Catalonia in 1939, Santiago Casares Quiroga also left Spain and reunited with his family. His apartment on Vaugirard street will become the refuge of exiled Galicia. Maria puts her energies into trying to tame the French language, while coming into contact with the Parisian theater scene. With an immense effort he manages to enter the Royal Conservatory.
Santiago Casares Quiroga, María’s father, portrayed as Minister of the Interior around 1932.
“I was born in November 1942 at the Les Mathurins theater.” María Casares makes her debut on the Parisian scene with the montage Deirdre of pains. The performance of the young actress does not go unnoticed by critics. The crush on the scenarios is immediate. Maria will never stop living among the footlights. “I find that theater is living by ten or one hundred, but you cannot separate life from theater,” he confesses.
From now on you can dedicate yourself to what you want most, but you will have to do it without family support. She lost her mother in 1945 and her father five years later, in 1950. Exiled and alone in her twenties, she had to invent a new life until she became the actress with capital letters in French theater.
Albert Camus
“There are two people in life who educated me deeply: my father and Albert Camus,” said María Casares. They met in March 1944 at the home of the writer Michel Leiris and, three months later, on June 6, 1944, they became lovers. It is the night of the Allied landing in Normandy. He is 30 years old; she, 21. Camus is already a recognized name in French letters. Has published Abroad and he is destined to become one of the essential figures in 20th century European literature. Casares is a promising actress with her whole future ahead of her.
The relationship will be born and will continue to be clandestine for more than fifteen years. Camus is married. His wife, Francine Faure, resides temporarily in Algeria. When he returns to Paris in September, Maria breaks up with the writer. They will know nothing about each other until four years later, when they pass each other by chance on a street in Paris. They will not separate again until Camus’s death in 1960. During those years, María Casares starred in several works of the future Nobel Prize, such as The righteous, The misunderstanding O Site status.
Albert Camus in 1957.
“I feel for you the infinite patience of love, the furious impatience of desire”, writes the author of The fish. In 2017, the 865 complete letters that both exchanged for years came to light, collected by the writer’s daughter, Catherine Camus. “Thanks to both, their letters make the earth more vast, the space more luminous, the air lighter simply because they have existed,” he writes in the foreword. In the letters there is love, passion, complicity and eroticism. “With him I knew that you couldn’t be alone, and I was never alone again,” says the actress.
In the 1950s, Casares established himself as a star of French cinema. He is a common face on billboards and magazines of the time. Among her great roles stands out that of the princess in Orfeoby Jean Cocteau (1950). Memorable are also his works with Gérard Philipe, Jean Vilar or Jean-Louis Barrault. At the same time, his career was consolidated in the theater. In 1949 he entered the Comédie Française and five years later, at the National Popular Theater, a theatrical project conceived as a public service. In addition, it is one of the promoters of the Avignon Festival.
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The death of Camus in January 1960 is a blow to Casares. A decade opens in which he will take on the challenge of doing theater in his mother tongue in Argentina. For exiled Spain, the actress is much more than a symbol. Under the direction of Margarita Xirgu (close friend of García Lorca), represents Yerma in Buenos Aires.
The bitter return
In 1976 he returned to Spain with the work The eyesoreby Rafael Alberti. María dazzles in Madrid and Murcia, but the show has not quite won the favor of the public. As if that were not enough, in Barcelona, the actress falls ill and the tour is suspended. The expected return has had a bitter end. He will return to Spain, but always with French works, and he will not set foot in Madrid or Galicia.
A year earlier, Casares had acquired French nationality. In 1978 she married the Alsatian actor André Schlesser. Secluded in her La Vergne estate, María reviews her life and writes the aforementioned memoirs, Privileged resident (title that alludes to his status on the original residence card issued by France), published in 1980. In them he recalls the relationship he had with characters such as Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau or Pablo Picasso.
María Casares, an acting star in France.
Tributes and decorations follow. Molière Award, National Theater or Legion of Honor, in France. In Spain, although late, the recognition comes with the Medal of Merit of Fine Arts and the Castelao Medal of Galicia in 1988. In 1996, the actress accepted that the theater awards in Galicia be named after her, but she will not be able to attend the first edition.
On November 22 of that same year he died on his estate in Alloue, donated to the French Republic to establish a theater school there. The “privileged resident” thus closed her last stage. “To live is to feel, without bitterness, all ages, until death arrives.”
This article was published in issue 627 of the magazine History and Life. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at [email protected].
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