uAmong the Austrian actors, the life imprisonment of the Vienna Burgtheater, Klaus Maria Brandauer is possibly the most German. But among the German-speaking stars of international cinema, among those who, because of their accent, have to play the exotic characters, the villains and foreigners, he is the one with his beautiful singsong, his irrefutable smile and the desire to look at his own role ironically , who seems the least Teutonic, even less than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Although Brandauer would probably refuse this cross-reference because he is concerned with the art, not with muscles, action, machine gun salvos. And for money only insofar as he expressly approved in an interview many years ago that the worse the film is, the higher the fee should be.
But the tools of an actor are, apart from mind and ability, above all his body, his face, his voice; then the origin and the biography – and how his art had to develop from these conditions was demonstrated by the young Brandauer with awe-inspiring shamelessness in “Mephisto”, István Szabó’s film from 1981, which as a Klaus Mann film adaptation and paraphrase about Gustaf Gründgens’ art of seduction and seduction is not entirely convincing. And as a portrait and self-portrait of the actor Brandauer, it is all the more beautiful and accurate.
At first he actually looks like Heinz Höfgen, the man from the provinces who now calls himself Hendrik and wants to be something in the big world of the theatre. His mistress gives him dance lessons, he stands there with legs that are too thin, an untrained upper body, weak, inelegant. And then he dances, with such passion and willpower, until he has convinced his lover and himself that he is the most irresistible man in the world.
The spirit that always denies
Later, when Höfgen is rapidly making a career, Brandauer quickly demonstrates that he can do any role. And when he is applauded as Mephisto, Brandauer and the film dare what Balzac dared in “Lost Illusions” when he not only told of the triumph that his hero Lucien celebrated with a theatrical criticism, but wrote the criticism into the novel. Brandauer as Gründgens as Mephisto is so deadbeat, outdated, seductive that you wish the rest of the film were “Faust”. And Brandauer sucked new life and unprecedented presence from the dead-quoted verses.
Brandauer’s condition was always that, on the one hand, with his blue eyes, his sensual mouth and the already praised smile, he had and still has a strong attraction. And on the other hand, measured against the general ideal of beauty, his face was always a bit too wide, his skull too bald at the top, his whole demeanor a bit too down-to-earth for him to be cool, taciturn, sure of his attractiveness, with Robert Redford (in Jenseits of Africa) or Sean Connery (in the “Russia House”) could have competed.
My name is Largo
And maybe that was always the secret of his presence: that he worked with his appearance and at the same time alluded to it with all his skills. As Maximilian Largo in the apocryphal Bond film Never Say Never, he wears a decidedly ugly suit jacket and a particularly unflattering hairdo, and it looks like he needed that resistance to goad himself into maximum villainess.
The amazing (and wrongly almost forgotten) exception is “Georg Elser”, the story of the Swabian craftsman who almost brought Hitler down by himself, the film portrait of a modest man played by Brandauer with almost provocative modesty, a film that is staged so precisely and unreservedly that one would not necessarily have expected the debut director Brandauer to be capable of it.
Because as a film star, he is usually also a man of the theater who, like Nero or Danton, watches himself play, seems to listen to the sound of his own sentences and also wants to be heard in the eleventh row. Just as he remains a film star as a stage actor, the man who, the more virtuoso his mimicry is, the more clearly Brandauer is recognizable. Someone who appropriates the roles, if necessary also submits them.
Our neighbor Oedipus
It is probably in the nature of his character that such a person rejects the tricks and visualizations of director’s theater and insists that Oedipus, Nathan or Wallenstein are neither our contemporaries nor our neighbors in the house opposite. It is nevertheless a finding that one would like to wish for greater popularity. However, when Brandauer tried in 2006, for the reopening of the Berlin Admiralspalast, to stage the “Threepenny Opera” true to the work, he failed because this work did not even want to be true to itself. The fact that he then teamed up with Peter Stein was a new beginning and at the same time loyalty to his own life’s work.
Klaus Maria Brandauer doesn’t like critics, and he sometimes throws out interviewers. Both pay him back with admiration and loyalty. You will have your reasons. Today, Thursday, Klaus Maria Brandauer will be 80 years old.
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