Claudio Brook was the man who kept his composure while Luis Buñuel took the world apart around him: butlers, priests and one saint on a pillar, all spoken in the same level, precise voice. Start with The Exterminating Angel and watch the servant, not the guests.
Fi1m perspective
The servants leave first. In The Exterminating Angel (1962) the cook, the maids and the footmen invent their excuses and slip out before the guests come up the stairs, and only Julio the butler stays. Claudio Brook plays him as a man who has never once considered doing anything else. When the guests discover they cannot leave the drawing room, he goes on pouring and clearing as though nothing has changed, and his calm is funnier and more unsettling than any of their fidgeting. We laughed at him and then felt a small chill, because a servant that well trained has stopped noticing whether the people he serves are still behaving like people.
That stillness was his trade. Brook came to film in 1955 after work as a voice dubber and on stage, and the voice stayed with him: a baritone, precisely spoken, the sound of a man used to being obeyed. Luis Buñuel used him five times between 1960 and 1969, as the Reverend Fleetwood in The Young One (1960), as Julio, as the ascetic Simón in Simon of the Desert (1965), and in Viridiana and The Milky Way, with Silvia Pinal opposite him in three of them. Directors kept casting him as authority, priests and bishops and butlers, and his height let him pass for a European or an Anglo-Saxon in the co-productions of the period.
Not everyone was persuaded at first. Some observers of the early Buñuel films found his delivery too declamatory, too much of the theatre, and the director worked to bring it down to something the camera could bear. You can see the argument settled in Julio, where the formality is the joke and the joke depends on his never breaking it. Simon of the Desert, in which he plays a saint on a pillar, is the lead among the Buñuel parts; we have not reviewed it, and will say only that a man whose gift was holding still seems well suited to a part that consists of it. After Buñuel came Arturo Ripstein's Castle of Purity (1973), a claustrophobic family drama often cited as one of his best roles, then a run of international work, Licence to Kill (1989), Revenge (1990), and finally Cronos (1993), Guillermo del Toro's first feature, in which the authority had turned into a dying industrialist's menace.
He made more than a hundred films and television productions over nearly forty years, and most viewers outside Mexico will know him from one. That one will do. Watch The Exterminating Angel and keep your eye on the butler rather than the guests; they are trapped, and he is simply at work.
Biography
Claudio Brook was a Mexican actor. Born Claude Sydney Brook Marnat in Mexico City on 28 August 1927, he made his film debut in 1955 and appeared in over 100 film and television productions during a career of nearly 40 years.
He was a noted collaborator of director Luis Buñuel, appearing in five of his films: The Young One (1960), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), Simon of the Desert (1965) and The Milky Way (1969). Brook also worked in the theatre, playing the lead role in the Mexican premiere of Man of La Mancha in 1969.
He received two Ariel Awards, for Best Actor in Memoriales perdidos (1985) and Best Supporting Actor in Esperanza (1988). For his work in motion pictures, he was inducted into the Paseo de las Luminarias. Brook died in Mexico City on 18 October 1995.
