Jesús Guzmán in his latest film “Amalia en Autumn” (2020).
When Jesús Guzmán, born in Madrid in 1926, turned 90, he received a congratulatory letter from Felipe VI. The actor, who died this Monday at the age of 97, had hundreds of films to his name in his career, but the best known remains that of the postman Braulio in “Crónicas de un pueblo”. Thanks to this black and white figure, people could still recognize him on the street almost 50 years later, as he himself admitted to the press when he was just 15 years old.
The series from the early 1970s, created by Antonio Mercero for Luis Carrero Blanco, was a reflection of a specific Spain, late Francoism, through the daily life of a small town in León that lived the privileges of that era in an exemplary way. The fictional location was La Puebla del Rey Sancho, but in reality it corresponded to the Madrid city of Santorcaz. It was born with propaganda intentions, but viewers of the only possible television, public television, were fascinated by the tight neorealism of the characters, who looked like them despite the fictional façade imposed by the regime. Mercero himself was uncomfortable with the series continuing to air on TVE decades after its premiere, which he felt was taken out of context.
Cover of TP magazine from December 1973 with five of the protagonists of the series “Crónicas de un pueblo”.
The Madrid actor appeared in 155 films and more than 300 comedies, dozens of magazines and television series, remembered on the occasion of these celebrations by the Association of Performing Artists, Intellectual Property Rights Management Entity (AISGE), which reported his death this Tuesday. Guzmán began working in his parents’ theater group at the age of nine. “As the son, grandson and great-grandson of actors, I was doomed to be an actor. And I learned everything from them,” he told the foundation. He recorded for television before there was television in Spain. He made it in Puerto Rico in 1954 during one of his extensive theater tours. On the small Spanish screen he continued to rely on costume brismo. He was one of the regular customers of the Mercero Guardia Pharmacy in Antena 3 and the Hostal Royal Manzanares de Lina Morgan in La 1.
Before he became famous as Braulio, he collected small roles in the great Westerns filmed in Spain, such as “Death Had a Price” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), born of Sergio Leone-Clint Duo. Eastwood and in the Spanish comedies of the time: from Sor Citroen (1967) with Gracita Morales, José Luis López Vázquez and Rafaela Aparicio to Se armó el Belén (1969) with Paco Martínez Soria. He also took part in Tres de la Cruz Roja, Atraco a las tres, La gran familia and Historias de la Television, among others.
Jesús Guzmán as postman Braulio in “Crónicas de un pueblo”.TVE
Her last appearance on screen was in the 2020 film Amalia in the Fall by Anna Utetch and Octavio Lasheras, starring María José Alfonso and Manuel Zarzo. Again, one of his works reflected current Spain, in a drama that showed a group of people in a nursing home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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