Brooke Smith
Brooke Smith is an actor, born 1967.
For thirty-five years Brooke Smith has been recognised for one role. Catherine Martin in The Silence of the Lambs is a young woman held in a pit for most of a film, which sounds like a thankless job and is in fact one of the harder kinds of acting there is. She has to be terrified for an hour without becoming an object, and the reason those scenes still land is that she plays fear as fury rather than as helplessness.
What she did next is more interesting than the fame suggests. She worked with Louis Malle on Vanya on 42nd Street and with Robert Altman on Kansas City, took a small part in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, did Trees Lounge for Steve Buscemi, and generally attached herself to directors instead of to franchises. On television she played Dr. Erica Hahn on Grey's Anatomy and Sheriff Jane Greene on Bates Motel, and she keeps appearing in prestige films in the kind of one-scene roles that need someone who can make a stranger feel like a person: a nurse in Interstellar, a producer in Bombshell.
A New Yorker, born in 1967, she is also a photographer and an author. That may explain why the screen work has never carried the hunger of someone with nothing else going on, and why the choices look like preferences rather than moves.
Movies (22)
- Interstellar (2014)
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
- Labor Day (2013)
- In Her Shoes (2005)
- Bombshell (2019)
- Bad Company (2002)
- Fair Game (2010)
- The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
- Random Hearts (1999)
- To the Bone (2017)
- Iron Jawed Angels (2004)
- The Namesake (2006)
- Melinda and Melinda (2004)
- See You in the Morning (1989)
- Trees Lounge (1996)
- Dude (2018)
- The Moderns (1988)
- A Little Help (2010)
- Series 7 (2001)
- Vanya on 42nd Street (1994)
- Kansas City (1996)
- The Night We Never Met (1993)
TV (10)
Where to start with Brooke Smith
Everyone starts with The Silence of the Lambs and that is fine, but watch it for her rather than for the two leads. She gets almost no exposition and has to build a whole person out of panic and back talk.
The one to go to next is Vanya on 42nd Street, a filmed Chekhov rehearsal staged in a derelict Manhattan theatre, where she is quietly superb and completely unlike her horror-movie reputation. Trees Lounge and Kansas City are the mid-1990s independent run and both hold up. Bates Motel is her best sustained television role, a sheriff with a spine. To the Bone is a small, difficult supporting part played with real tact, and Interstellar is barely a scene, useful only as proof of how often she is in things you have already watched.
The films people know
Catherine Martin in The Silence of the Lambs is the part, and she plays it as rage rather than helplessness, which is why it still holds. The later films are mostly small precise roles in large productions, including Nolan and Roach.
The independent nineties
The best stretch of her film career and almost nobody has seen it. Vanya on 42nd Street is a Louis Malle film of a rehearsal of Chekhov and is extraordinary. Trees Lounge is the Steve Buscemi and Series 7 a very early reality-television satire.
Television
Two decades of American television, usually as someone in authority with a private problem. Bates Motel is the largest role, Ray Donovan the prestige one, and Them and Grotesquerie are the horror series that have used her most recently.