Considered by many to have been the greatest American actor of the postwar era, Marlon Brando with his diction and sheer animal magnetism helped to create a new kind of naturalistic movie actor. Marlon Brando's success opened the door for such other actors as Paul Newman, James Dean, and Rod Steiger.
Born Marlon Brando Jr., he was nicknamed Bud so as not to be confused with his salesman father. His mother had been an amateur actress who once trod the boards with a young HENRY FONDA at the Omaha Community Playhouse. After a rebellious childhood and spotty education, Marlon Brando left home for New York in 1943, although not, at first, with the intention of becoming an actor. Extreme nearsightedness and a badly damaged knee (from a high school football injury) kept him out of military service, and he bounced from one odd job to another. Without any previous theatrical experience, he decided to follow his sister Jocelyn’s lead and study acting. Quite by chance, his dramatic coach was Stella Adler, a highly respected teacher who helped develop Stanislavsky’s method style of acting in America. Eventually, Marlon Brando would become the premier method actor of his time.
Marlon Brando's stage career began in 1944 with appearances in plays such as Morning Telegraph and Twelfth Night. His first important role, however, was Nels in I Remember Mama. Later came a series of roles in unsuccessful productions such as Truckline Cafe, Candida, and The Eagle Has Two Heads (with Talullah Bankhead, who unsuccessfully tried to seduce him and, later, had him fired).
The year 1947 was critical for Marlon Brando. He met ELIA KAZAN, joined the Actor’s Studio, and eventually won the role that catapulted him to stardom. Kazan cast and directed him in the role of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The stage role was originally intended for John Garfield, but Marlon Brando had his chance after the older actor scored a big hit in the movies with Body and Soul (1947). Marlon Brando soon became the toast of Broadway as the brazenly appealing, torn-T-shirted Stanley. During the run of the play, the actor’s nose was broken in a backstage accident. Marlon Brando chose not to have it fixed, believing his face to be more masculine with its new flaw.
Marlon Brando’s critical and popular success in Streetcar led to movie offers. He turned down a seven-year contract from MGM, content to pick his own projects on a freelance basis. His first choice was The Men (1950), a serious, downbeat film about crippled war veterans. The movie was admired by the critics but ignored at the box office.
While Streetcar turned Marlon Brando into a stage star, the movie version in 1951, also directed by Kazan, turned him into a major film star. His association with Kazan during these early years was propitious. Except for The Wild One (1954), Kazan directed the actor in his most important early hits, including Viva Zapata! (1952) and On the Waterfront (1954). The role of Terry Malloy in Waterfront, originally intended for Frank Sinatra, was the high point of Marlon Brando’s film career. Though nominated for an Academy Award for roles in A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, and Julius Caesar (1953), he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Waterfront.
Always a fascinating actor regardless of the vehicle, Marlon Brando surprised audiences by starring in the musical Guys and Dolls (1955). In spite of cries of “sellout” on the tongues of the intelligentsia, the actor went on to choose increasingly eclectic roles ranging from comedies, such as The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), to big-budget spectacles, such as the ill-fated remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Unlike most other major stars, Marlon Brando reveled in playing villains in any number of films, among them The Ugly American (1963), The Chase (1966), Burn! (1969), Apocalypse Now (1979), and The Formula (1980).
Difficult to direct, he directed himself in One-Eyed Jacks (1960) with mixed results. A moody piece, it holds up well today despite its slow pace and self-indulgent touches, principally because of Marlon Brando’s ever-surprising performance. It was not a hit at the box office, however, and, in fact, neither were many of Marlon Brando’s films during the rest of the 1960s. Yet, despite such flops as Morituri (1965) and others, his reputation was still such that Charlie Chaplin chose to direct him in A Countess from Hong Kong (1967). Unfortunately, it was not a success for either Charlie Chaplin or Marlon Brando.
In 1972, Marlon Brando resurrected his career with his memorable performance as Don Corleone in FRANCIS COPPOLA’s THE GODFATHER. Winning the Oscar for Best Actor, he sent a Native American surrogate to the awards celebration to announce that he would not accept the statuette in protest of America’s treatment of its native people, an event that has since become part of Hollywood lore. In that same year, Marlon Brando electrified audiences with his sexual derring-do in Bernardo Bertolucci’s X-rated film Last Tango in Paris. Since that watershed year, however, the actor was rarely seen on screen.
Except for a bizarre performance opposite Jack Nicholson in The Missouri Breaks (1976), Marlon Brando was content to accept hefty sums for small featured roles in films such as the 1978 Superman (for which he was paid more than $3 million for a dozen days’ work, a fee that made him—at the time—the industry’s highest-paid actor). He also had a small but critical role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), heightening the movie’s powerful and haunting climax. After flopping with George C. Scott in The Formula (1980), a film in which Marlon Brando reportedly chose to have his lines broadcast into his ear through a hearing aid rather than learn them, he all but disappeared from public view. Amid rumors of his ballooning weight, the actor remained in relative seclusion on his South Sea island until he resurfaced and acted for free in an antiapartheid movie titled A Dry White Season (1989).
During the 1990s, Marlon Brando staged a comeback, starting first with his parody of the Don Corleone character in The Freshman (1990), followed by his cameo as the inquisitor Torquemada in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) and his role as a burned-out clinical psychologist in the peculiar romantic comedy Don Juan De Marco (1994). Marlon Brando made an indelible impression playing the mad experimental scientist in an updated adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), directed by John Frankenheimer.
This, too, was a peculiar but memorable role. As Frankenheimer’s biographer Gerald Pratley wrote, “Whatever one thinks of Marlon Brando’s peculiar creation of Moreau (a cross between Gilbert and Sullivan and Orson Welles), it can at least be said that we’ve never seen the ‘mad scientist’ portrayed in this manner before.” Less memorable were the films Marlon Brando made later in the decade: The Brave (1997), Free Money (1998), and Autumn of the Patriarch (1999). Marlon Brando died in 2004.
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