Obituary: Fernando Rey

Fernando Casado Arambillet (Fernando Rey), actor: born La Coruna, Spain 20 September 1917; died Madrid 9 March 1994.

FERNANDO REY sprang into international prominence in Viridiana (1961), which marked Luis Bunuel's return to Spain after two decades in exile.

The great moralist was working in Mexico (of which he was a naturalised citizen) when a young local producer proposed a co-production with a Spanish company. Bunuel was not anxious to return to his native country, except to see his family, but was persuaded that he could help its movie industry escape from the cheap melodramas and soap operas which comprised most of its output. But he stipulated that he would work with the company run by Juan Antonio Bardem, who was anti- Franco. Bunuel wrote the screenplay with Julio Alejandro, and an astonishing thing it was. Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is sent to visit her uncle, played by Rey, before taking her vows. He notes the resemblance to his dead wife and after robing her in her bridal dress is so overcome by lust that they are soon re-enacting old passions on his bed.

The film was not only an attack on family values, but a frontal assault on the Catholic Church. Bunuel smuggled it out of Spain, which immediately banned it, but its reception at the Cannes Festival restored his reputation after years in which his Mexican films were not exported.

Bunuel was to work in France and Mexico in the Seventies, but he returned to Spain for Tristana (1970), again using Rey as a surrogate for himself, the middle-aged lecher who finds himself trapped by sex, which he regards as essential to the human condition, sad and funny at the same time. The film was based on Benito Perez Galdos's 19th-century novel, as was Nazarin, Bunuel's 1959 masterpiece - and, indeed, Viridiana. Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is an unworldly orphan, the exact opposite of Don Lope (Rey), whose wealth and independence attract her. Her attraction for him is solely carnal and, since his seduction of her and his refusal to marry her are betrayals of her Spanishness, he only does so when he fears he will lose her to another. Because the story is a tract on being Spanish Bunuel set it in Toledo, the quintessential Spanish city.

Rey also appeared in Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), as a South American diplomat whose fellow guests, like himself, are unable to leave a dinner party. Bunuel's earlier film on this theme - El Angel Exterminador (1962) - is an excoriating satire on the bourgeoisie, but this was a blunderbuss attack, if even more admired. It was one of his late films which showed that, like his fellow countryman Picasso, he had developed a contempt for his public - in his case for disregarding his most deeply felt film, Nazarin, championed by John Huston, who arranged for it to be shown at Cannes, but otherwise little seen outside Mexico till the mid-Sixties. In this case, instead of polemic and argument, he offered the anarchy and subversion expected of him.

For what turned out to be his final film, Cet obscur objet du desir (1977), Bunuel returned to the theme of sexual obsession, with Rey again as the man obsessed. The object desired was again a younger woman, played uninterestingly and disconcertingly by two separate actresses. Rey's frustration was powerfully conveyed, especially (and naturally) as she makes him watch, behind a grille, while she bestows her naked favours on a man of her own age. He was dubbed into French by Michel Piccoli, who had also played similar parts four times for Bunuel, suggesting that these two actors shared the role of his alter ego - as Max von Sydow did for Bergman.

Meanwhile, Hollywood had called Rey, to play a South American capo of the drugs racket hunted through New York by detective 'Popeye' (Gene Hackman) in John Frankenheimer's The French Connection, which won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1971. He repeated the role in the rather better The French Connection II (1975), set in Marseille. Rey brought no lip-smacking to villainy: he was a tired man, just doing his job, and as cattle barons or cattle rustlers in some dozen spaghetti westerns he merely lent his presence. It was enough: the hooded eyes and the beard were sufficient. He had gravitas, if of a melancholy order, and it was not surprising to find him twice cast as Philip II, in El Greco (1964), with Mel Ferrer in the title-role, and Cervantes (1968) with Horz Buchholz. He had spent years polishing his craft and slipped easily into the part of the first Spanish actor to become known throughout the world.

He had fought against Franco in the Civil War and had come to movies in the early 1940s by dubbing foreign actors into Spanish. After becoming an international name he worked in most of the world's leading movie industries, sometimes in those multi-lingual jobs which gathered other artists of his stature - as Valerio Zurlini's Il Deserto dei Tartari (1976) and Stuart Rosenberg's Voyage of the Damned (also 1976). In the former, set in a remote army garrison, he was the only officer with combat experience, causing him to wear an iron corset and to have injections under stress; in the latter, set on board a liner carrying Jewish refugees, he was the president of Cuba.

This was among the weakest of cosmopolitan films, but among the best ever made was Francesco Rossi's dazzling political thriller, Cadaveri Eccelenti (1976) - in the director's own words, an examination of 'the combination of power and its mechanism' with its daring (then, anyway) conclusion that the Vatican and the Communists use each other clandestinely for their own purposes. Rey played a government minister who is almost certainly involved in some of the later murders - and, incidentally, von Sydow was also in all three films.

Rey was Lepidus in Charlton Heston's Antony and Cleopatra (1970), with himself as Antony and Hildegarde Neil as the Egyptian queen. It was not exactly prime Shakespeare, and it is not quite certain whether Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1966) is Shakespeare at all, since he takes the most English of plays - Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 - to the gloomy plains of Castille; but this is a superb transcription, with Welles on form (as rarely in his later career) as Falstaff, and Rey as the Earl of Worcester.

Over some of Rey's other films it is best to draw a veil (including Robert Altman's Quintet, 1979), but one which was hardly seen in Britain deserves a mention: Mauro Bolognini's visually ravishing and sensual version of Dumas, La Dame aux Camelias (1981). Given that those are the qualities which Bolognini brings to it, it is the most satisfying version of this much- filmed tale. Isabelle Huppert is a rightly youthful Marguerite Gautier, who was only 23 when she died. Rey is a German count who befriends her and then requires her to take the place of his dead daughter, which means becoming his mistress. This is only implied, but for this actor the perversions, delights and horrors of the flesh were easy to portray.

He will be remembered for a dozen films, but most of all for two with Bunuel, Viridiana and Tristana.

(Photograph omitted)