To Know Her is to Love Her: The life and films of Soledad Miranda

Watch any of Jesus Franco's films from 1969-70 and you will likely be enchanted by the mesmerising presence of dark-eyed beauty Soledad Miranda, falling prey to that gaze as totally as Susan Westinghouse in Vampyros Lesbos or the members of the medical board in She Killed in Ecstasy.

Wanting to know more, you discover the tragic story of a young woman who possessed that indefinable quality that could have made her a star and who died on the verge of making the big time. But we are getting ahead of ourselves…

Soledad Miranda was born July 9 1943 in Seville, Spain to parents of Portuguese origin and given the name Soledad Redon Bueno (translating as "Good Solitude"). With her aunt Paquita Rico a popular Spanish actress, singer and flamenco dancer, showbusiness ran in the family and she started her career early, appearing in the San Fernando talet contest aged eight.

Miranda made her screen debut at 16, appearing as a ballerina in the film La Bella Mimi. Her first role for Jesus Franco was in the director's 3rd feature, a surprisingly conventional vehicle for the singer and dancer Mikaela Wood, made at a time when the director was in the process of coming to terms with the industry as it existed in Generalissimo Franco's Spain.

Franco and Miranda's paths then diverged for the next few years. While Franco developed his unique vision with The Awful Dr Orlof, The Diabolical Doctor Z, Succubus and many others, Miranda went on to appear in assorted Spanish and Italian low-budget features, predominantly spaghetti westerns and horror films along with bit-parts in the occasional international co-production.

Despite her diligence, stardom did not beckon. As Franco commented, reflecting on the state of the Spanish industry in the 60s, "It is very difficult for actors in Spain to achieve any kind of recognition.". Thus, Miranda got married, to Portuguese racing driver José Manuel Conceicao Simones, gave up acting and had a baby. Miranda still had the bug, though, and sought to return to the screen. The industry, however, according to Franco did not know what to do and sought "to turn her into the usual idiot, into a doll".

Fortunately Franco was able to make a decisive intervention this time round. In Spain to shoot his Bram Stoker adaptation Count Dracula with an all-star cast including Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski, he cast Miranda in the role of Dracula's victim, Lucy Westenra. The role required Lee to do his usual nuzzling job, yet the sensation the difficult to impress actor experienced was reputedly anything but usual, still experiencing goosebumps after multiple takes.

The prolific Franco soon cast Miranda in his next project, and the next again. He saw something happening: "When she began working in my films, it was like watching her undergo a transformation. She told me it was the first time in her life she felt so fulfilled."

Something about the Spanish director had obviously served as a catalyst – that term one so often hears applied to the auteur – for Miranda. Perhaps it was her assumption of the pseudonym Susann Korda, adopted because she did not want her family to know the sort of films she was making (and derived in typically Franco manner from Jacqueline Susann, the author of The Valley of the Dolls, and Alexander Korda, the Hungarian emigre producer). Whatever the case, going into her pre-Franco chrysalis as an effervescent yet girlish presence, Miranda had emerged transformed in a beautiful, haunted and womanly one.

Watch Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy or Eugenie de Sade and one thing that immediately strikes you is the way in which Miranda's comitted, serious performances utterly transcend the kitschy, campy, trashy aspects of the films – direction, decor, music etc – enjoyable though they may be.

In each case Miranda plays a heavy, dramatic role. In Vampyros Lesbos she is child of Count Dracula, unable to love without destroying her cathexis and doomed to an immortal existence filled with pain and ennui. In She Killed in Ecstasy she is the avenging wife of a scientist driven to suicide by the medical board after they reject his researches, completing her task then driving her car off a cliff in order to be reunited with her husband in death. And in Eugenie de Sade she is the stepdaughter of a sadean writer/philosopher who embarks on a series of motiveless murders and an incestuous relationship with her father to then finds her loyalties torn when he compels her to murder the other man she loves…

Yet, this picture of Miranda's work with Franco is incomplete. Nightmares Come at Night – a reworking of The Diabolical Dr Z – has only recently resurfaced more than 30 years after it was made, while Sex Charade remains unavailable.

Miranda's last performance for Franco was in the 1970 production The Devil Came from Akasava. An adaptation of a (Bryan) Edgar Wallace story, it saw the actress play a somewhat lighter role than the three films above, as a British intelligence agent posing undercover as a prostitute in order to entrap some dangerous criminals intent on stealing a philosopher's stone type device.

Two weeks after the film finished shooting, Miranda was dead.

In the meantime, Vampyros Lesbos had successfully opened in German. The film's producer Karl Heinz Mannchen had visited Miranda and offered her a two-year contract, with a guarantee of two starring roles in big-budget productions per year.

"She was going to become a major star in Germany. The next day she had the accident."

The circumstances surrounding Miranda's death are, as with many aspects of her life, shrouded in mystery and rumour. Did she die more or less immediately or in the hospital a few days later? Whatever the case, it's clear that the convertible in which she and her husband were driving was involved in a collision. Miranda's side of the car was crushed and she sustained horrible injuries, whilst her husband – he was driving – emerged more or less unscathed.

Eerily, the accident seems to have been foreshadowed by an obscure short film the couple made together prior to their marriage, the 1967 Portuguese entry Un d'a en Lisboa about a young couple travelling between Lisbon and Estoril. The start and end points of that fateful journey?

Who knows.

Regardless, Soledad Miranda's early death has preserved her enigmatic beauty forever and ensured her immortality so long as her Franco collaborations continue to be screened…

Further reading:
Soledad Miranda Tribute Site
Tim Lucas article on Soledad Miranda
IMDB entry for Soledad Miranda