30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando was an American actor who is considered by many to be the greatest screen actor of all time. During his glory period, from 1950 to 1972, he covered himself with the mantle of unforgettable greatness and by his genius and force of personality helped to forge and popularise a new stye of acting, the Method School.
His life was more complex and more celebrated than any Hollywood plot. He died as one of the world's truly obese men and most prominent eccentrics, and his behaviour in later life nearly overshadowed his earlier incredibly high standard of postwar acting; a standard against which he himself would later often come up wanting.
Brando won two Academy Awards for Best Actor. The first one was in 1954 for the movie 'On the Waterfront' and the second was in 1972 for 'The Godfather'. Brando himself refused to accept this Oscar due to a conflict with his beliefs at the time. The award however is still recognized. On the American Film Institute's List of Greatest Male Stars of All Time Brando is placed at number four.
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At school Brando was constantly in trouble for bad behaviour and he was eventually expelled. He failed to get in the army because of a damaged knee, and in 1943, at the age of 19, he moved to New York to join his sisters, partly to strike out on his own and partly in an attempt to prove wrong his father's low expectations for his future.
In New York Brando studied firstly at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, then at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School and finally at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio. It was at the New School's Dramatic Workshop that he met and studied with Stella Adler and learned the techniques of the Constantin Stanislavski System, the system which became known throughout the world as Method acting, rejecting traditional acting techniques in favor of a deep emotional expressiveness with the emphasis on the character's inner motivation.
After some summer stock roles Brando made it to Broadway in 1944 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. In 1946 he appeared on Broadway as the young hero in the political drama 'A Flag is Born', and in the same busy year he co-starred with Katharine Cornell in 'Candida' and then briefly toured with Tallulah Bankhead in 'The Eagle Has Two Heads'.
He achieved stardom, and some would say, acting immortality, in 1947, when he portrayed the brutish Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's play 'A Streetcar Named Desire', directed by Elia Kazan. The outstanding success of the play and his role in it established him amongst America's acting elite and made his Hollywood debut inevitable. His first movie role was in 1950, portraying a paraplegic World War II veteran in Fred Zinnemann's 'The Men' for producer Stanley Kramer. He then reprised his role as Kowalski in the movie version of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and in so doing instilled a consciousness of 'The Method' into the world of acting.
He received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations for 'Streetcar', and he then appeared in a string of performances which also received nominations - 'Viva Zapata!' in 1952, Joseph L Mankiewicz's 'Julius Caesar' as Mark Antony the following year, and Kazan's 'On the Waterfront' in 1954 as longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up boxer who "coulda been a contender," for which he won his first Oscar for Best Actor. For three years in succession, from 1951 to 1953 Brando won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a true reflection of the immense impact he had made, and he was already firmly established as the most exciting acting talent in the world. He had also given an iconic performance as the rebel Johnny in 'The Wild One' in 1953, ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply). This movie became a cult classic, and helped create the street rebel image that was so widely copied by other stars of the Fifties, particularly James Dean and Elvis Presley.
He cemented his pre-eminent position during the 1950's with performances in a variety of roles. He managed a singing role as Sky Masterson in 'Guys and Dolls' in 1955 ;as Sakini, a Japanese interpreter for the U.S. Army in postwar Japan in 'The Teahouse of the August Moon' the following year; as a Korean Air Force officer in Joshua Logan's 'Sayonara' in 1957 for which he received another Best Actor Academy Award nomination, and as a Nazi soldier in 'The Young Lions' in 1958.
In 1961 Brando tried his hand at directing with 'One Eyed Jacks' which was being produced by his own company, Pennebaker Productions which he had formed in 1959, but it went way over-budget. The film bombed at the box-office and Brando went back to acting though he would always believe that all actors are essentially their own directors during the shooting of a picture. His next role was in 1962 in the remake of 'Mutiny on the Bounty'. His foppish interpretation of Fletcher Christian received poor reviews but the film was one of the top-earning movies of the year and received a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It also marked a turning point in Brando's career. His darker, self-destructive side was becoming more prominent.
He began to put on considerable ammounts of weight and his reputation for being volatile and difficult resurfaced. During the remainder of the 1960's he appeared in the unsuccessful 'The Chase' in 1966, 'Reflections in a Golden Eye' the following year, portraying a gay army officer and 'Burn!' in 1969, his personal favorite but which was a commercial failure. By the end of the decade his career had gone into reverse. He was pilloried by movie critics for supposedly not living up to his gifts. His political activism, which he maintained throughout his life, ranging from the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, and including an appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers. He became box office poison and from 1969 did not make a film for 3 years.
His return from movie exile came in 1971 with his electrifying portrayal of Vito Corleone in 'the Godfather' considered to be one of the best films of all time, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. In typical Brando fashion, he refused the award and boycotted the award ceremony, sending American Indian Rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who appeared in full Apache dress, to state his reasons, which were based his dislike of how American Indians were being stereotyped on screen.
The following year Brando was once again nominated for the Best Actor Award, for the seventh time, for his performance in the controversial and highly erotic 'Last Tango in Paris' co-starring Maria Schneider.
Brando's career thereafter was uneven. He showed that he was still able to hit the acting heights as in his performance as Colonel Kurtz in 'Apocalypse Now' in 1979 and he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for 'A Dry White Season' in 1989 but for the most part he seemed content to pick up enormous amounts of money for relatively small roles, as in 'Superman' in 1978 when he was paid $3.7 million for just two weeks of work and the disappointing remake of 'The Island of Dr. Moreau' in 1996. His weight and girth expanded uncontrollably and Brando didn't seem to care that it limited the parts he could play. The main theme running through his last years is waste.
Brando's last movie was as an aging jewel thief in the uninspiring thriller 'The Score' in 2001, opposite Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton.
Brando married his first wife, actress Anna Kashfi in 1957. They had a son, Christian Brando, on May 11, 1958 and they divorced in 1959.
In 1960, Brando married his second wife, Movita Castaneda, a Mexican actress seven years his senior; they separated in 1962 and the marriage was annulled in 1968. They had 2 children, Miko Castaneda Brando in 1961 and Rebecca Brando Kotlizky in 1966.
Tahitian beauty Tarita Teriipia, who played his love interest in 'Mutiny on the Bounty', became Brando's third wife in August, 1962. She was 20 years old, 18 years younger than Brando. They had two children Simon Teihotu Brando in 1963 and Tarita Cheyenne Brando in 1970. Brando and Tarita divorced in July 1972.
In addition Brando had the following known offspring:
By an unknown mother, Stefano Brando in 1967.
By adoption:
Petra Brando-Corval in 1972), daughter of Brando's assistant Caroline Barrett and James Clavell.
Maimiti Brando in 1977
Raiatua Brando in 1982
By his long-time housekeeper, Maria Christina Ruiz:
Ninna Priscilla Brando in 1989
Myles Jonathan Brando in 1992
Timothy Gahan Brando in 1994
The last decades of Brando's life were clouded by serious health problems and family tragedy. In May 1990, son Christian shot and killed the boyfriend of Brando's daughter, Cheyenne, in the family home at Beverley Hills. The 31-year old Christian received a 10-year sentence after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served 5 years. But the trial caused an even deeper family tragedy. Marlon's daughter, Cheyenne committed suicide by hanging herself in 1995.
By this time Brando's years of personal indulgence had caught up with him. He weighed well over 300lbs and during the last years of his life he appeared in public less and less. For several years he suffered from advanced diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis (damage to the tissue inside the lungs). Shortly before his death he was told that the only way to prolong his life was to allow oxygen tubes to be inserted into his lungs. He refused permission.
Marlon Brando died on July 1, 2004, from respiratory failure brought on by pulmonary fibrosis. He was 80. After cremation his ashes were mingled together with those of his lifelong friend, Wally Cox, and were scattered, some in Death Valley and some in Tahiti.
