Fernando Rey

Born Fernando Casado Arambillet and known everywhere as Fernando Rey, he worked in Spain, across Europe and in the United States, and appeared in more than 150 films over half a century. Almost all of them used the same asset: an air of complete social ease, the bearing of a man who has never been asked to explain himself.

Luis Bunuel understood exactly what to do with that. In Viridiana, Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, Rey plays courtly, immaculately dressed older men whose appetites are the entire joke, and he never plays the joke. That is the trick. His dignity is the delivery system for the indecency, and the films are funnier and crueller because he refuses to signal.

The international fame came from The French Connection, where he plays the drug importer Alain Charnier and returns as him in French Connection II. Charnier works because Rey plays a criminal enterprise as though it were a pleasant business trip: he is the calm the whole film is chasing, and the contrast with Gene Hackman's fury is the film's real structure.

Between those poles sits an enormous run of European co-production journeywork, taken with no apparent snobbery: westerns including Navajo Joe, Companeros, Return of the Seven and Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, Robert Altman's Quintet, The Desert of the Tartars, and late appearances in The Hit and 1492: Conquest of Paradise. A Goya for Best Actor and a Cannes acting prize sit on the record.