An influential, eccentric stage and screen actor–perhaps the most influential and respected of his generation–Marlon Brando first made his name as an exponent of “The Method,” an acting style based on the teachings of Constantin Stanislavsky. Method acting rejected the traditional techniques of stagecraft in favor of an emotional expressiveness ideally suited to the angst-ridden atmosphere of postwar American society. Brando studied the Stanislavsky technique in the 1940s, first at the New School and later at the Actors Studio.
The Nebraska native made his Broadway debut in the sentimental hit I Remember Mama (1944), and co-starred opposite Katharine Cornell in Candida (1946) and briefly toured with Tallulah Bankhead in The Eagle Has Two Heads the same year. His breakthrough came with his searing portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams‘ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), directed by Elia Kazan. The role established a new order of acting intensity and eventually led Brando to Hollywood. He also made his first TV appearance during this period, on a 1949 episode of Actors Studio (ABC). Brando‘s only other contributions to TV have been a ten-minute, Emmy-winning cameo as American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in Roots: The Next Generation (ABC, 1979) and a 1991 PBS special on the Actors Studio.
Implementing what he learned under Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, Brando influenced American film actors from James Dean to Robert De Niro to River Phoenix. As the unappointed spokesman for his generation, the young Brando became identified with a character in revolt against something he could not comprehend. When asked in The Wild One (1954), “What are you rebelling against?” he replies, “Whaddaya got?” Although Brando‘s rebels conveyed a strong sense of danger, the actor also lent pathos to their stance, leaving his characters both menacing and vulnerable. Since he became synonymous with these types, Brando spent most of his career trying to purge himself of this initial identification.
Brando‘s first film was Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950), in which he portrayed a paraplegic war veteran struggling for dignity. Rather than play the role for its inherent pathos, however, Brando etched a portrait of an embittered, incoherent man-child. Kazan’s film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) followed, forever stamping the Brando image in the public imagination and making him one of the first actors of the “new generation” to break through to stardom, before Dean, Paul Newman and Rock Hudson. The role earned him the first of four consecutive Best Actor Academy Award nominations. He followed up with impressive, very individualistic performances as a Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952) and as Marc Anthony in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1953).
Brando‘s film heft was affirmed with The Wild One, a motorcycle melodrama, which also helped make the black motorcycle jacket the uniform of the young tough (or young tough wanna-be). The Stanley Kowalski brute was now removed from Tennessee Williams’ confining New Orleans ghetto, his anger directed scattershot against society at large. Brando then earned a richly deserved Best Actor Oscar for his multi-layered performance as an ex-fighter who becomes involved with corrupt union officials and witnesses a murder in Kazan’s powerful On the Waterfront (1954).
With this success, Brando became a full-fledged Hollywood power. He played against type in a number of subsequent roles: an ill-tempered Napoleon in Desiree (1954); a smarmy singing gambler in Guys and Dolls (1955); the Japanese interpreter in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956); a Korean War pilot in love with a Japanese entertainer in Joshua Logan’s Sayonara (1957, receiving yet another Best Actor nomination); and a controversially effete Fletcher Christian in the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty. He even tried his hand behind the camera, assuming directing chores from Stanley Kubrick on One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a psychological Western that pitted him against Karl Malden. Despite all his efforts, his rebel persona had nevertheless become a cliché by the end of the decade.
Brando finally killed his rebel image in the 1960s. He appeared as a drifter romancing a middle-aged Italian woman (Anna Magnani) and a Southern belle (Joanne Woodward) in Sidney Lumet’s uneven The Fugitive Kind (1960), an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ stage play Orpheus Descending. Brando went on to appear as a figure of authority in The Ugly American (1963) and a con artist in Bedtime Story (1964). But despite complex performances in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and Burn! (1969), he had been largely abandoned by his audience. Voted a top box office star from 1955 to 1958, he dropped to a has-been in the late 1960s.
It was not until Francis Ford Coppola cast him in the title role of The Godfather (1972) that he regained stature. Brando‘s sensitive turn as the aging Don Corleone received critical praise, set the tone for the entire film and earned him a second Best Actor Oscar (which he declined). He gave a bizarre, somewhat controversial performance as a self-destructive American in Bernardo Bertolucci’s disturbing Last Tango in Paris (1972); the sexually charged role–in which has been long rumored that Brando took the “Method” to new levels in his love scenes with Maria Schneider–earned the actor his seventh Best Actor Academy Award nomination.
Since then, repeatedly announced his retirement from acting but made more than a dozen films. In Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976), he offered an eccentric, over-the-top performance as a hired gun tracking horse thief Jack Nicholson and followed with a highly-paid but brief cameo as Jor-El, father of Superman (1978). He was downright terrifying as Kurtz, the dark heart of Coppola’s hallucinogenic war drama Apocalypse Now (1979). Brando, at the height of his professional eccentricity and engaged in a unique cat-and-mouse dance with his director, delivers one of the most compelling and avant garde performances of his career, and both the role and the film would become more potent with the passage of time. He earned a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his engaging performance as a crusty South African civil rights lawyer in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989). Brando also impressed critics and audiences with his comic send-up of Don Corleone in the lightweight romp The Freshman (1990) and for his turn as a psychiatrist married to Faye Dunaway in the offbeat romance Don Juan DeMarco (1995).
He also sometimes phoned in his performances in unworthy films in exchange for hefty paydays, appearing as the mysterious scientist who creates half-humans in John Frankenheimer’s remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) and in 1997 filmed the muddled flop Free Money as the corrupt prison warden The Swede. Brando‘s last screen outing was the routine heist thriller The Score (2001), in which he had a supporting role opposite acting heavyweights of subsequent generations Robert De Niro and Edward Norton. Although that screen combo didn’t ignite the level of sparks audiences may have been hoping for, Brando nevertheless delivers charming and charismatic turn that blew his colleagues off the screen each time he briefly appeared, despite word of his refusal to be on the set at the same time as director Frank Oz. At the time of his death in 2004, Brando had agreed to appear as himself in the planned film Brando and Brando, but it did not come to pass.
Far from the athletic figure he cut in his youth, Brando ballooned to enormous girth and his almost androgynous good looks suffered with his seeming indifference to his physical gifts. He also became known for his reclusive existence on the Tahitian island he purchased after filming Mutiny on the Bounty, and, later in life, at his home above Beverly Hills.
His eccentric lifestyle, though, kept him in the press: his (at least) nine children by various wives and companions; his 1972 Oscar refusal delivered by faux Native American Sasheen Littlefeather, in protest of Hollywood’s depiction of the indigenous tribes; offbeat and outrageous on-set behavior; the killing of daughter Cheyenne’s fiancé by son Christian; Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide at age 25; and an amusing televised incident where he playfully insisted interviewer Larry King kiss him on the lips. Brando co-authored his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me which was published in 1994, and by the time of his death in 2004 it was clear he had traveled a long way from his native Nebraskan farmland and his life became both more celebrated and more baroque than any Hollywood film plot.
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