The Thousand Lives of Teresa Gimpera

Teresa Gimpera (Igualada, 1936), model, actress, presenter and muse of the Gauche Divine, had been asked many times to publish her memoirs. She did not decide to do so until she met the film journalist Toni Vall, who had written a book about the Bocaccio club, with a chapter dedicated to her, considering that she was the protagonist of the image that served as its emblem, signed by Xavier Miserachs. It was here that the complicity that emerges from the lively chat through which both present Teresa Gimpera. Així és la vida (Columna), the collection of memories that allows us to discover Gimpera's life, a bit like a movie, was born.

Between tears and laughter, sitting on one of the sofas at the Flash Flash omelet restaurant, Gimpera converses with Vall about everything that has happened to her in 85 years, which she has been compiling in many photos, such as the one of her friend Colita that serves as the cover for the book, and press clippings. "I am lucky to keep everything," she emphasizes. Her memoirs do not follow a chronological order, only at the beginning, and narrate in the first person moments, around which she reflects and jumps in time, without forgetting some secret that Vall has extracted from her. Cinema, love, death, the passage of time, motherhood, feminism or the world of fashion shows are many of the themes that emerge, not hesitating to evaluate more recent issues, such as influencers or Tinder, without wanting to sound too much like "a grumpy granny."

"Have I been happy? I think so. I have lived tragedies, but I have also been very lucky. I am over eighty years old and I can say that I have lived things that most women have not lived. "What a life you've had!", they often tell me. I have not done what was expected of me and I am happy that it has been that way." This is how she forcefully summarizes her life, which began with exile in France. Daughter of republican teachers, her brother and she took refuge with their mother in an abandoned hotel in Pas-de-Calais, while her father spent years locked up in the Argelers concentration camp. "There are few war refugees who are alive and I am one of them," she states.

That misery and that fear color her early years, with some vacations in Menorca and her first loves intermingling with her studies and youth. Marriage and motherhood come very early to Gimpera, after marrying Octavi Sarsanedas and becoming a mother to her first child, Marc, at 21 years old. Gimpera had two more children, Job and Joan. The youngest died fighting, a victim of drugs and AIDS. "It's been more than thirty years since he died. The absence is hard, very hard, but you get used to living," she says. Gimpera would divorce her first husband, in love with American actor Craig Hill, whom she met on the set of Amenaza Black Box and from whom she would never separate again. "Falling in love is very easy, but falling in love with a woman with three children is not so much," she points out. After 25 years of relationship, they would marry, after Hill proposed to her at Via Veneto.

By chance, like the many she says have happened to her in her life, she began her career as a model. One day, when she went to pick up her husband from his job at the Seix Barral publishing house, they asked her to take some photos for a beer calendar. That would begin a career that would lead her to become one of the most omnipresent faces in Spain from the mid-sixties to the late seventies, gracing magazine and newspaper pages, presenting multiple television programs, and filming, no more and no less, a total of 155 films.

The Spirit of the Beehive, directed by Víctor Erice, she says was her best film, even though she and the rest of the actors, including Fernando Fernán Gómez, found it hard to understand what it was about when they were filming it. There were many more films, such as Les Pétroleuses, which she filmed with Brigitte Bardot, of whom she does not have very good memories, and Claudia Cardinale, with whom she did get along better.

In her career, there is also the casting with Alfred Hitchcock, who noticed her for a character in Topaz, Juanita de Córdoba, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican woman. She, who was blonde and did not have an English accent that could sound like it was from Latin America. "I thought: he's crazy," she admits, but she didn't hesitate to travel to Los Angeles for the audition. She didn't pass it ---she asked the director for a carajillo to calm her nerves and he didn't understand it---, but she traveled first class and got drunk on the flight back. Despite everything, she assures that she wouldn't have liked to be dark-skinned. This is one of the few moments of which she doesn't keep any photos, only in the hotel on her way back home, in Madrid.

Gimpera also met Rock Hudson, a friend of Hill's; she recognized Bette Davis in an elevator, and sent a letter to Grace Kelly commenting that, if she returned to cinema, she could be her lighting double because everyone told her she looked like her. All this happened at a time when Gimpera's life was "planes and hotels," but that frenzy is now a bit far off, even more so with the pandemic. She remembers how Hill told her that "age doesn't forgive" and realizes that she is now at that point, where, furthermore, many friends are already gone and doctors become the new companions. "In old age, you have to be a little reckless," she confesses. Even more so when she still has many things to do and still has a pending conversation with her children, which her memoirs might help her face. She would like to know what they felt when she went from one place to another to film and they always asked her: "When are you coming back?"