Carmen machi

Born in the Madrid town of Getafe in 1963, María del Carmen Machi Arroyo has Italian roots on her father’s side, with family in Genoa. From a very young age, she felt the call of the acting profession. At the age of 17, she made her stage debut with Taormina Teatro, a local company with which she was associated for many years. “It was my great school, we premiered one show a month,” she recalls.

Her career as an actress took off when she became a disciple of the great actor and theater director José Luis Gómez , who in the mid-1990s turned La Abadía theater into a point of reference for lovers of good theater. She recruits Carmen Machi for the venue’s inaugural show, “Altarpiece of Greed, Lust, and Death.” She is therefore part of the first promotion of the so-called ‘Abadía quarry’. On stage, she participates in historical productions such as “La noche XII”, by William Shakespeare , directed by Gerardo Vera and “Roberto Zucco”, by Lluís Pascual, for the National Dramatic Center.

In La Abadía she represents “Santiago y cerra España”, the work in which she is discovered by the casting director Luis San Narciso, mentor of Paz Vega , Javier Cámara or Belén Rueda , who recruits her for the series 7 vidas . “Here, still, the theater actor was not put on TV because they said that the way of projecting the voice and the gesture did not add up. But Luis’s sense of smell was decisive. I fit into 7 livesbecause we work with the public and the direction of the voice is not to a microphone, but to the stands. That’s why they said we screamed a lot”. In the show she plays Aída García, a self-conscious waitress, assistant and housewife who, although at first she is quite secondary, little by little she is gaining in presence due to her good acceptance. So much so that after the cancellation from the sitcom, she heads the cast of the character-focused spin-off, Aída , which is a hit, maintaining success even as an exhausted Machi leaves the series named after her character in 2009 (she returned temporarily for several subsequent episodes).

Despite the cathodic success, Carmen Machi never leaves theater aside, where she stands out especially with her monologues, in which the actress gives her all, both in “La tortoise de Darwin”, by Juan Mayorga , where she is literally transmuted into this animal, as in “Trial of a Fox” by Miguel del Arco , in which he dares to embody the legendary Helen of Troy.

In cinema, various directors have taken advantage of it. She made her feature film debut as a short-lived broadcast journalist, on Shacky Carmine . She was also none other than Teresa Panza in El caballero Don Quixote , a version of the second part of the classic Miguel de Cervantes novel by director Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón , and a client of a hairdresser in Torremolinos 73 . Javier Rebollo , who had given her a small role in What I Know About Lola , gives her her first leading role in La mujer sin piano , in which she plays a typical housewife.

She also played one of the main characters in Pájaros de papel , Emilio Aragón ‘s directorial debut , where she was a cupletista. She achieved some success with Javier Cámara in Que se mueran los feos , where she was a woman in need of affection, after overcoming breast cancer and discovering that her husband was unfaithful to her. In La estrella , Alberto Aranda ‘s debut , she plays Trini, a battered woman.

Carmen Machi has also been one of the girls of the great specialist in actresses Pedro Almodóvar . In Talk to her, she was the head of nurses at the clinic where Benigno (also Javier Cámara ) worked, the protagonist. The man from La Mancha recovered her in Los abrazos rotos , where she was one of the actresses in the film “Girls and suitcases”, directed in fiction by the character of Lluís Homar , where she played a desperate girl after being abandoned by her partner . Almodóvar took advantage of her presence to shoot a short film, La concejala antropófaga , a delirious monologue in which she was a politician who spoke of sex and cannibalism.