Brando changed modern acting by popularizing "the Method," a technique which emphasized emotional truth and naturalistic style. Brando was a smash hit on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947; in the early 1950s he was nominated in four consecutive years for best actor Oscars, winning once for the 1954 film On the Waterfront. (He was also nominated as Marc Antony in 1953's Julius Caesar, for playing Emiliano Zapata in 1952's Viva Zapata!, and for the 1951 film version of Streetcar.) In the 1970s Brando became hot all over again, winning a second Oscar for playing Mafia kingpin Don Corleone in The Godfather. In later years Brando became famous for his reclusiveness and Orson Welles-like girth. His last feature film was the 2001 heist thriller The Score, in which he was paired with Method-trained actors from two younger generations: Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton.
Career Highlights: Last Tango in Paris, The Godfather, On the Waterfront
First Major Screen Credit: The Men (1950)
Biography
Marlon Brando was quite simply one of the most celebrated and influential screen and stage actors of the postwar era; he rewrote the rules of performing, and nothing was ever the same again. Brooding, lusty, and intense, his greatest contribution was popularizing Method acting, a highly interpretive performance style which brought unforeseen dimensions of power and depth to the craft; in comparison, most other screen icons appeared shallow, even a little silly. A combative and often contradictory man, Brando refused to play by the rules of the Hollywood game, openly expressing his loathing for the film industry and for the very nature of celebrity, yet often exploiting his fame to bring attention to political causes and later accepting any role offered him as long as the price was right. He is one of the screen's greatest enigmas, and there will never be another quite like him.
Born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, NE, Brando's rebellious streak manifested itself early, resulting in his expulsion from military school. His first career was as a ditch digger, but his father ultimately grew so frustrated with his son's seeming lack of ambition that he offered to finance whatever more meaningful path the young man chose to pursue. Brando opted to become an actor -- his mother operated a local theatrical group -- and he soon relocated to New York City to study the Stanislavsky method under Stella Adler. He later worked at the Actors' Studio under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, and his dedication to the principles of Method acting was to become absolute. After making his professional debut in 1943's Bobino, Brando bowed on Broadway a year later in I Remember Mama; for 1946's Truckline Cafe, the critics voted him Broadway's Most Promising Actor.
Brando's groundbreaking star turn in the 1947 production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire delivered on all of that promise and much, much more; as the inarticulate brute Stanley Kowalski, Brando stunned audiences with a performance of remarkable honesty, sexuality, and intensity, and overnight he became the rage of Broadway. Hollywood quickly came calling, but he resisted the studios' overtures with characteristic contempt -- he was a new breed of star, an anti-star, really, and he refused to play ball, dismissing influential critics and making no concessions toward glamour or decorum. It all only served to make Hollywood want him more, of course, and in 1950 Brando agreed to star in the independent Stanley Kramer production The Men as a paraplegic war victim; in typical Method fashion, he spent a month in an actual veteran's hospital in preparation for the role.
While The Men was not a commercial hit, critics tripped over themselves in their attempts to praise Brando's performance, and in 1951 it was announced that he and director Elia Kazan were set to reprise their earlier work for a screen adaptation of Streetcar. The results were hugely successful, the picture winning an Academy Award for Best Film; Brando earned his first Best Actor nomination, but lost despite Oscars for his co-stars, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter. Again with Kazan, he next starred in the title role of 1952's Viva Zapata! After walking out of the French production Le Rouge et le Noir over a dispute with director Claude Autant-Lara, Brando portrayed Mark Antony in the 1953 MGM production of Julius Caesar, sparking considerable controversy over his idiosyncratic approach to the Bard and earning a third consecutive Oscar bid.
In 1954, The Wild One was another curve ball, casting Brando as the rebellious leader of a motorcycle gang and forever establishing him as a poster boy for attitude, angst, and anomie. That same year, he delivered perhaps his definitive screen performance as a washed-up boxer in Kazan's visceral On the Waterfront. On his fourth attempt, Brando finally won an Academy Award, and the film itself also garnered Best Picture honors. However, his next picture, Desiree, was his first disappointment. Despite gaining much publicity for his portrayal of Napoleon, the project made a subpar showing both artistically and financially. Brando continued to prove his versatility by co-starring with Frank Sinatra in a film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Guys and Dolls. Another Broadway-to-screen adaptation, The Teahouse of the August Moon, followed in 1956 before he began work on the following year's Sayonara, for which he garnered yet another Oscar nomination.
In 1958's The Young Lions, Brando co-starred for the first and only time with Montgomery Clift, another great actor of his generation; it was a hit, but his next project, 1960's The Fugitive Kind, was a financial disaster. He then announced plans to mount his own independent production. After both Stanley Kubrick and Sam Peckinpah both walked off the project, Brando himself grabbed the directorial reins. The result, the idiosyncratic 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks, performed respectably at the box office, but was such a costly proposition that it could hardly be expected ever to earn a profit. In 1962, Mutiny on the Bounty underwent a similarly troubled birthing process; Brando rejected numerous screenplay revisions, and MGM spent a record 19 million dollars to bring the picture to the screen. When it too failed, his diminishing box-office stature, combined with his increasingly temperamental behavior, made him a target of scorn for the first time in his career.
The downward spiral continued: Brando himself remained compulsively watchable, but suddenly the material itself, like 1963's The Ugly American, 1966's The Chase, and 1967's A Countess From Hong Kong, was self-indulgent and far beneath his abilities. His mysterious career choices, as well as his often inscrutable personal and professional behavior -- he was quoted as declaring acting a "neurotic, unimportant job" -- became the topic of much discussion throughout the industry. He continued to push himself in risky projects like 1967's Reflections in a Golden Eye, an adaptation of a Carson McCullers novel in which he portrayed a closeted homosexual, but the end result lacked the old magic. While Brando still commanded respect from the media and his fellow performers, much of Hollywood began to perceive him as a bad and unnecessary risk, a perception which features like 1968's Candy, 1969's Queimada!, and 1971's The Nightcomers did little to alter.
The Brando renaissance began with 1972's The Godfather; against the objections of Paramount, director Francis Ford Coppola cast him to play the aging head of a Mafia crime family, and according to most reports, his on-set behavior was impeccable. Onscreen, Brando was brilliant, delivering his best performance in well over a decade. He won his second Academy Award, but became the subject of much controversy when he refused the honor, instead sending one Sacheen Littlefeather -- supposedly a Native American spokeswoman, but later revealed to be a Hispanic actress -- to the Oscar telecast podium to deliver a speech attacking the U.S. government's history of crimes against the native population. Controversy continued to dog Brando upon the release of 1973's Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci's masterful examination of a sexual liaison between an American widower and a young Frenchwoman; though critically acclaimed, the picture was denounced as obscene in many quarters.
Despite his resurrection, Brando did not reappear onscreen for three years, finally resurfacing in The Missouri Breaks opposite Jack Nicholson. Although he had by now long maintained that he continued to act only for the money, the eccentricity of his career choices allowed many fans to shrug off such assertions; however, never before had Brando appeared in so blatantly commercial a project as 1978's Superman, earning an unprecedented 3.7 million dollars for what essentially amounted to a cameo performance. His next appearance, in Coppola's 1979 Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now, was largely incoherent, while for 1980's The Formula, he appeared in only three scenes. And for a decade, that was it: Brando vanished, living in self-imposed exile on his island in the Pacific, growing obese, and refusing the few overtures producers made for him to come back to Hollywood.
Only in 1989 did a project appeal to Brando's deep political convictions, and he co-starred in the anti-Apartheid drama A Dry White Season, earning an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role as an attorney. A year later, he headlined The Freshman, gracefully parodying his Godfather performance. Tragedy struck in 1990 when his son, Christian, killed the lover of Brando's pregnant daughter, Cheyenne; a long legal battle ensued, and Christian was found guilty of murder and imprisoned. Even more tragically, Cheyenne later committed suicide. The trial placed a severe strain on Brando's finances, and he reluctantly returned to performing, appearing in the atrocious Christopher Columbus: The Discovery in 1992. He also wrote an autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me. Don Juan DeMarco, co-starring Johnny Depp, followed in 1995, and after 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau, Brando starred in Depp's directorial debut The Brave. In 1998, he appeared in Yves Simoneau's Free Money, headlining a cast that included Donald Sutherland, Mira Sorvino, Martin Sheen, and Charlie Sheen.
Again absent from the public eye for a spell, Brando made news again in 2001 as health problems forced him out of a cameo role in director Keenan Ivory Wayans' horror spoof sequel Scary Movie 2 (he was replaced on short notice by actor James Woods). Brando made his first film appearance in three years with a considerably more prestigous role in director Frank Oz's one-last-heist thriller The Score (2001). Though the film's production was plagued with the by-then de rigeur rumors of Brando's curious on-set tirades and bizarre behavior, filmgoers remained eager to see the actor re-teamed with former Godfather cohort Robert DeNiro, with Edward Norton and Angela Bassett rounding out the cast. Later that year, director Francis Ford Coppola added to Brando's legend by lengthening his infamously slurred speeches for the director's recut Apocalypse Now Redux.
Absent from the screen for the next three years, Brando passed away suddenly in 2004 of pulmonary fibrosis. While The Score was his last onscreen performance, shortly before his death he recorded voice parts for an animated film called Big Bug Man and a Godfather videogame. A trend that was becoming increasingly popular, the visage of Brando was even resurrected for a "new" performance in director Bryan Singer's big-budget Superman Returns in the summer of 2006. Culled from old outtakes from the first two films, the digitally manipulated clips added to the film's passing-of-the-torch feel. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
Beginning with his early career in the films of the 1950s, through his powerful roles in such classics as "On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire", and "The Godfather", Marlon Brando (born 1924) has captivated the American public with his intense on-screen presence, as well as with his personal life of controversy and excess.
Before James Dean, Marlon Brando popularized the jeans-and-T-shirt look, with and without leather jacket, as a movie idol during the early 1950s. The theatrically trained actor began to turn away from his youth-oriented persona with such movie roles as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1953). After winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for On the Waterfront (1954), he portrayed a wide variety of characters on-screen, garnering popular acclaim and critical consensus as one of the greatest cinema actors of the late twentieth century.
Early Career
Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3, 1924. He grew up in Illinois. After expulsion from a military academy, he dug ditches until his father offered to finance his education. Brando moved to New York to study with acting coach Stella Adler and at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio. While at the Actors' Studio, Brando adopted the "method approach, " which emphasizes characters' motivations for actions. He made his Broadway debut in John Van Druten's sentimentalI Remember Mama (1944). New York theater critics voted him Broadway's Most Promising Actor for his performance in Truckline Cafe (1946). In 1947 he played his greatest stage role, Stanley Kowalski - the brute who rapes his sister-in-law, the fragile Blanche du Bois - in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. As The New York Review surmised, "The rest is stardom and gossip and a small handful of wonderful films."
Hollywood beckoned to Brando, and he made his motion picture debut as a paraplegic World War II veteran in The Men (1950). Although he did not cooperate with the Hollywood publicity machine, he went on to play Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, a popular and critical success that earned four Academy Awards. His next movie, Viva Zapata! (1952), with a script by John Steinbeck, traces Emiliano Zapata's rise from peasant to revolutionary to president of Mexico. Brando followed that with Julius Caesar and then The Wild One (1954), in which he played a motorcycle-gang leader in all his leather-jacketed glory. Next came his Academy Award winning role as a longshoreman fighting the system in On the Waterfront, a hard-hitting look at New York City labor unions.
Pinnacle
During the rest of the decade, Brando's screen roles ranged from Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée (1954), to Sky Masterson in 1955's Guys and Dolls, in which he sang and danced, to a Nazi soldier in The Young Lions (1958). From 1955 to 1958 movie exhibitors voted him one of the top ten box-office draws in the nation. During the 1960s, however, his career had more downs than ups, especially after the MGM studio's disastrous 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, which failed to recoup even half of its enormous budget. Brando portrayed Fletcher Christian, Clark Gable's role in the 1935 original. Brando's excessive self-indulgence reached a pinnacle during the filming of this movie. He was criticized for his on-the-set tantrums and for trying to alter the script. Off the set, he had numerous affairs, ate too much, and distanced himself from the cast and crew. His contract for making the movie included $5, 000 for every day the film went over its original schedule. He made $1.25 million when all was said and done.
Brando's career was reborn in 1972 with his depiction of Mafia chieftain Don Corleone in The Godfather. He refused his Academy Award for Best Actor as a protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. Brando did not appear at the awards show to personally deny the trophy. Instead, a Native American Apache named Sacheen Littlefeather read his protest. However, in September of 1994, Brando told the broker in possession of the award, Marty Ingels, that he now wishes to own it. Ingels would not return it.
Brando proceeded the following year to the highly controversial yet highly acclaimed Last Tango in Paris, which was rated X. Since then Brando has received huge salaries for playing small parts in such movies as Superman (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for A Dry White Season in 1989, Brando also appeared in The Freshman with Matthew Broderick. In 1995, he costarred in Don Juan DeMarco with Johnny Depp. Young people who have not seen Brando's amazing efforts in his early films will not find the same genius in his later movies. The small roles he has played do not demand the acting range for which he had once achieved so much praise. Janet Maslin of the New York Times, in her review of Don Juan DeMarco, wrote, "Mr. Brando doesn't so much play his role as play along." The critic added, "Don Juan DeMarco verges on the sad when its subject is vitality, since Mr. Depp's so clearly eclipses that of his co-star."
In early 1996 Brando costared in afilm called The Island of Dr. Moreau. Entertainment Weekly reported that the actor was using an earpiece to remember his lines. His costar in the film, David Thewlis, told the magazine that he was nonetheless still impressed by Brando. "When he walks into a room, " Thewlis noted, "you know he's around."
A Life of Turmoil and Self-Indulgence
There have been countless pages of print written about Brando's reclusive and self-indulgent lifestyle, including two books released in 1994: Brando: The Biography, by Peter Manso, and Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, by Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey. The book by Marlon Brando is obviously the one he authorizes, but Manso's book is a result of seven years of research and interviews with more than a thousand people. Time magazine, though, questioned Manso's ethics in conducting such excessive research: "Driven to possess another man's life, Manso becomes the literary version of one of the late 20th century's scariest specimens, the celebrity stalker."
It has been observed that Brando has perhaps loved food and womanizing too much. His best acting performances are roles that required him to show a constrained and displayed rage and suffering. His own rage may have come from parents who did not care about him. Time magazine reported, "Brando had a stern, cold father and a dream-disheveled mother - both alcoholics, both sexually promiscuous - and he encompassed both their natures without resolving the conflict." Brando himself wrote in his autobiography, "If my father were alive today, I don't know what I would do. After he died, I used to think, 'God, just give him to me alive for eight seconds because I want to break his jaw."'
Brando's acting teacher, Stella Adler, is often credited with helping him become a brilliant actor. Brando said in a reprint of Manso's book presented in Premiere magazine, "If it hadn't been for Stella, may be I wouldn't have gotten where I am - she taught me how to read, she taught me to look at art, she taught me to listen to music."
Although Brando avoids speaking in details about his marriages, even in his autobiography, it is known that he has been married three times to three ex-actresses. He has at least 11 children ranging in age from two to thirty-eight. Five of the children are with his three wives, three are with his Guatemalan housekeeper, and the other three children are from other affairs. One of Brando's sons, Christian, told People magazine, "The family kept changing shape. I'd sit down at the breakfast table and say, 'Who are you?"' Christian is now at a state prison in California serving a 10-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter in the death of his sister's fiancee, Dag Drollet. He claimed Drollet was physically abusing his pregnant sister, Cheyenne. Christian said he struggled with Drollet and accidentally shot him in the face. Brando, in the house at the time, gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Drollet and called 911. At Christian's trial, People reported one of Brando's comments on the witness stand, "I tried to be a good father. I did the best I could."
Brando's daughter, Cheyenne, was a troubled young woman. In and out of drug rehabilitation centers and mental hospitals for much of her life, she lived in Tahiti with her mother Tarita (one of Brando's wives whom he met on the set of Mutiny on the Bounty). People reported in 1990 that Cheyenne said of Brando, "I have come to despise my father for the way he ignored me as a child." After Drollet's death, Cheyenne became even more reclusive and depressed. A judge ruled that she was too depressed to raise her child and gave custody of the boy to her mother, Tarita. Cheyenne took a leave from a mental hospital on Easter Sunday in 1995 to visit her family. At her mother's home that day, Cheyenne, who had attempted suicide before, hanged herself.
Brando's years of self-indulgence are visible - he weighed well over 300 pounds in the mid-1990s. To judge Brando by his appearance and dismiss his work because of his later, less significant acting jobs, however, would be a mistake. His performance in A Streetcar Named Desire brought audiences to their knees, and his range of roles is a testament to his capability to explore many aspects of the human psyche. Brando seems perfectly content that his best work is behind him. As for his fans, they must accept that staying power is not what confirms the actor's brilliance.
Further Reading
Gary Cary, Marlon Brando: The Only Contender (London: Robson, 1985).
Christopher Nickens, Brando: A Biography in Pictures (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987).
Richard Schickel, Brando: A Life in Our Times (New York: Atheneum, 1991).
(born April 3, 1924, Omaha, Neb., U.S. — died July 1, 2004, Los Angeles, Calif.) U.S. actor. He gained stardom on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). An early member of the Actors Studio, he brought its method acting style to his first film, The Men (1950). His slurred, mumbling delivery marked his rejection of classical dramatic training, and his true and passionate performances proved him one of the great actors of his generation. After starring in the screen version of Streetcar (1951), he appeared in films such as The Wild One (1954), On the Waterfront (1954, Academy Award), The Godfather (1972, Academy Award), Last Tango in Paris (1972), and Apocalypse Now (1979).
1924–2004, American film actor, often described as the greatest of his generation, b. Omaha, Nebr. Regarded as the foremost practitioner of “method” acting as taught by American disciples of Constantin Stanislavsky at New York's Actor's Studio, the young Brando combined a rough sex appeal with a powerful immediacy and a naturalistic performance style, one which revolutionized and transformed the art of screen acting. He made his film debut as a bitter paraplegic veteran in The Men (1950). His stage reputation was firmly established with his Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a role he later committed to film (1951). His early film roles included a Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952), Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1953), a motorcycle-riding rebel in The Wild One (1954), a battered dockworker in On the Waterfront (1954; Academy Award), and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls (1955).
Brando made his directorial debut with One-Eyed Jacks (1961), in which he also starred. After appearing in a number of mainly forgettable movies during the late 1950s and 60s, he created two of his most acclaimed roles in 1972 films: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, in which he played a memorable Mafia patriarch and for which he won (and subsequently refused) the Academy Award, and Bernard Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, an erotic tour de force that created considerable controversy on its release. Brando continued to appear in many films, including in supporting roles in Missouri Breaks (1976), Apocalypse Now (1979), A Dry White Season (1988), and The Freshman (1990) and as a costar in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), The Brave (1997), and The Score (2001).
Bibliography
See his autobiography (1994); L. Grobel, Conversations with Brando (rev. ed. 1999); biographies by D. Downing (1984), N. Bly (1994), P. Manso (1994), P. Ryan (1994), R. Schickel (rev. ed. 1999), and P. Bosworth (2001); studies by T. Thomas (1973), B. Braithwaite (1977), and R. Tanitch (1994).
A twentieth-century American actor. He first gained fame on Broadway in 1947 in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando transferred his brooding portrayal of Stanley Kowalski to film in 1951 and thereafter concentrated on making motion pictures, including On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and the controversial Last Tango in Paris.
"The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money."
"To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication."
"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis."
"I don't mind that I'm fat. You still get the same money."
"Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite."
Brando was born to Marlon Brando Sr. (1895–1965) and Dorothy Pennebaker Brando
(1897-1954) in Omaha, Nebraska.[1] In 1935, when he was 11 years old, his parents separated. His mother briefly took her three
children (Marlon, Jocelyn (1919–2005) and Frances Brando (1922-1994) to live with her mother in Santa Ana, California, until 1937 when the parents reconciled and moved to Libertyville, Illinois, a village northwest of Chicago. The family was primarily of Dutch,
Irish, German, Huguenot
and English stock. Contrary to what is stated in some biographies, Brando's grandfather
was not French; he, Eugene E. Brando, was from New York state [2]. Brando's grandmother Marie Holloway abandoned Eugene and their son Marlon Brando
Sr. when he was five years old [3]. The Brando family had
been long settled in New York state. The family name was earlier spelled Brandow and originated with a German immigrant, Johann Wilhelm Brandau, who settled in America in the early 1700s [4]. Brando's mother, Dodie, was an unconventional but intelligent and talented
woman. She smoked, wore pants and drove automobiles at a time when it was unusual for women to do
so. However she suffered from alcoholism and often had to be retrieved from Chicago bars by Brando's father. She later became a leader of Alcoholics Anonymous. Dodie was an actress and administrator in local theater and was written about
for her theatrical work by the Omaha newspapers. She helped a young Henry Fonda to begin his
own acting career, and fueled Brando's interest in stage acting. His father, Marlon Sr., was a
gifted amateur photographer. Brando's maternal grandmother, Bessie Gahan Pennebaker Meyers, to whom Brando was perhaps closer
than his own mother, was also unconventional. Widowed at a young age, she worked to support herself as a secretary and later as a
Christian Science healer, and was well known in Omaha. Her father, Myles Gahan, was a
doctor from Ireland and her mother, Julia Watts, was from England. Brando was a gifted mimic
from early childhood and developed a rare ability to absorb the tics and mannerisms of people he played and to display those
traits dramatically while staying in character. His sister, Jocelyn Brando, however, was
the first to pursue a career in acting, going to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. She later appeared on
Broadway, in movies and on television. Next, Marlon's sister Frannie left college in California to study art in New York. Marlon
followed.
Brando had a tumultuous childhood. He was held back a year in school and was later expelled from Libertyville High School. At the
age of 16, he was sent to Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota where his father had gone before him. At Shattuck, he excelled at theater and
got along well within the structure of the school. In his final year (1943), he was put on probation for talking back to an
officer during maneuvers. A part of his probation was that he be confined to the school campus but he eventually tried sneaking
off campus into town and was caught. The faculty voted to expel him. He received support from his fellow students who thought the
punishment too harsh. He was later invited back for the next year, but decided not to finish school.
He worked as a ditch-digger in his hometown as a summer job arranged by his father, but had
decided to follow his sisters to New York. One sister was trying to be a painter and the other had already appeared on
Broadway. He visited his sister Frances in New York at Christmas 1942 and liked the experience. Brando was given six months of support from his father, after which
his father offered to help him get a job as a salesman. Brando left Illinois for New York City, where he studied at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, New School
Dramatic Workshop, and the Actors' Studio. It was at the New School's Dramatic Workshop
that he studied with Stella Adler and learned the techniques of the Stanislavski System. There is a possibly apocryphal story in
which Adler spoke about teaching Brando, saying that she had instructed the class to act like chickens, then adding that a bomb was about to fall on them. Most of the class
clucked and ran around wildly, but Brando sat calmly and pretended to lay an egg. When
Adler asked Brando to explain his actions, he replied, "I'm a chicken - What do I know from a bomb?"
Brando used his Stanislavski System skills for his first summer-stock roles in Sayville, New York on
Long Island. His behavior got him kicked out of the cast of the New School's
production in Sayville, but he was discovered in a locally produced play there and then made it to Broadway in the bittersweet drama I Remember Mama in 1944. Critics voted him "Broadway's Most
Promising Actor" for his role as an anguished veteran in Truckline Café, although the play was a commercial failure. He achieved real stardom, however, as Stanley
Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, directed by Elia
Kazan. Brando sought out that role, driving out to Provincetown,
Massachusetts, where Williams was spending the summer, to audition for
the part. Williams recalled that he opened the screen door and knew, instantly, that he had his Stanley Kowalski. Brando's
performance revolutionized acting technique and set the model for the American form of method
acting. This approach to a role was never seen before and all similar roles mirror Brando's.
Brando's first screen role was as the bitter paraplegic veteran in The Men in 1950.
True to his method, Brando spent a month in bed at a veterans' hospital to prepare for the role.
Marlon Brando in a trailer for the film A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
In 1953, he also starred in Lee Falk's play Arms and the Man. Falk was proud to tell
people that Marlon Brando turned down an offer of $10,000 per week on Broadway, in favor of working on Falk's play in
Boston. His Boston contract was less than $500 per week. It would be the last time he ever
acted in a stage play.
Brando became a hero for the younger generation by playing motorcycle rebel Johnny Strabler in 1953's The Wild One. He created the rebel image for the rock-and-roll
era. Many rock-and-rollers like Elvis Presley imitated Brando's look and character. Elvis also copied Brando's role as Johnny
while playing Vince in his 1957 movie Jailhouse Rock. Brando's explosive
screen presence exuded a raw sexuality that drew repeat ticket purchases among female theater goers of all ages. Theater managers
related accounts of sold out weekday matiness where small children ran up and down the aisle making motorcycle noises while their
mothers sat transfixed.
Marlon Brando was purported to be a hero for James Dean, who was said to have idolized him
and copied his acting and persona. Brando claimed in his autobiography Songs My
Mother Taught Me that when Elia Kazan introduced him to James Dean on the set of East of Eden, he remarked that 'He was nervous when we met and made it clear
that he was not only mimicking my acting but also what he believed was my lifestyle. He said he was learning to play the conga
drums and had taken up motorcycling, and he obviously wanted my approval of his work.' He later remarked in his book that 'In
retrospect, I realize it's not unusual for people to borrow someone else's form until they find their own, and in time Jimmy
did.' William Bast, a famous screen writer at that time, compared Marlon's acting style to be "heavy as lead" while James was
more "mercurial and light".
Director Nick Ray took the gang image from the movie The Wild One and brought it to his movie, "Rebel Without A
Cause", and thus emphasized Brando's effect on youth.
Brando as Mark Anthony in a trailer for the film Julius Caesar (1953)
Aspects of the rebel culture that included motorcycles, leather jackets, jeans and the rebel image, which inspired generations
of rebels, came thanks to that film and Brando's own unique image and character. The sales of motorcycle related paraphernalia,
leather jackets, jeans, boots and Tee shirts skyrocketed throughout the country[citation needed]. The film had a similar effect on overseas audiences. Local authorities and
religious figures lamented the effect it was having on the youth of their respective countries.
Under Kazan's direction, and with a talented ensemble around him, Brando won the Oscar for
his role of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. For the famous I
coulda been a contender scene, Brando convinced Kazan that the scripted scene was unrealistic, and with Rod Steiger improvised the final product.
Brando followed that triumph by a variety of roles in the 1950s that defied expectations: as Sky Masterson in
Guys and Dolls, where he managed to carry off a singing role; as Sakini, a
Japanese interpreter for the U.S. Army in postwar Japan in The Teahouse of the August Moon; as an Air Force officer in Sayonara; and a Nazi officer in The Young Lions. Although
he won an Oscar nomination for his acting in Sayonara, his acting had lost much of its energy and direction by the end of
the 1950s.
In the 1960s Brando starred in films such as Mutiny on the
Bounty (1962); One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a western that would be the only
film Brando would ever direct; Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967),
portraying a repressed gay army officer; and Burn! (1969), which Brando would later claim
as his personal favorite, although it was a commercial failure. Nonetheless, his career had gone into almost complete eclipse by
the end of the decade thanks to his reputation as a difficult star and his record in overbudget or marginal movies.
The Godfather
Brando as the iconic Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
His performance as Vito Corleone in 1972's The
Godfather was a mid-career turning point. Director Francis Ford Coppola
convinced Brando to submit to a "make-up" test, in which Brando did his own makeup (he used cotton balls to simulate the
puffed-cheek look). Coppola was electrified by Brando's characterization as the head of a crime family, but had to fight the
studio in order to cast the temperamental Brando whose reputation for difficult behavior and demands was the stuff of backlot
legend. However, Paramount studio heads wanted to give the role to Danny Thomas in the hope
that Thomas would have his own production company throw in its lot with Paramount. Thomas declined the role and actually urged
the studio to cast Brando at the behest of Coppola and others who had witnessed the screen test. Brando's "sit down" scene
between rival mobsters is generally described as one of the greatest moments in film history. Brando won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance.
Brando turned down the Academy Award, the second actor to refuse a Best Actor Oscar
(the first being George C. Scott for
