Rarely does news from the world of culture travel faster than the death of Montserrat Carulla, La Carulla, this Tuesday at the age of 90. The day after theatres reopened, after the long odyssey of the Covid that has kept them closed up and shut down for too many weeks, Catalonia's most emblematic actress has gone.
Carulla was a woman both discreet and generous, two conditions that are only within the reach of those who come to the end of their lives grateful that their professional success has not changed them, and perhaps for that reason, she was as admired and loved by her peers, as by the critics and the general public, who never ceased to profess a true devotion to her wherever she was present. For this reason, the article in front of her last name was more than well earned and no one was surprised when people referred to her directly as La Carulla, a distinction that only rewards the best, and that's what she was, without a doubt.
She was a reference point and never closed herself into a single discipline, be it theatre, film or television. She was successful in all of them, as her mastery of the performing arts was so overwhelming that she has been at the very top for 50 years. One of the greatest. There was no project which she would flatly refuse, no challenge which she would resist for fear of what people might say - something that, if part of the identity of anywhere, might be so of Catalonia - where envy sometimes seems to gallop faster than in other latitudes. Also, a place where too many people these days disguise themselves as something they are not in order to meekly satisfy those who provide their daily bread, in exchange for writing what others want to read. You know, those who were once scribes now working as journalists. The stuff of everyday life.
Carulla had no complexes and, therefore, took sides. That is, she became involved beyond her profession in causes when others would have advised her to be prudent. When she received a Gaudí award for her career achievement from her colleagues, in a theatre that was bursting at the seams, she presented herself as an "actress, Catalan and independentista". In all three facets, she was recognized and she threw herself at them with youthful energy, but also as someone who was inexorably running out of time to see an independent Catalonia. She was like that, a woman of three loyalties: to the culture, to the country and to the language. Or what is the same, a defender of the identity of Catalonia, something so often questioned from the outside as a first step to breaking its back. Something that is much more present in political life than it seems at first glance, and especially in the ongoing struggle with the Spanish state to evade the imposition of uniformity for which some are working tirelessly.