MSN Movies Legend #1 - Marlon Brando

In his pomp, though, there was nobody to touch him, his magnetic presence, smouldering sexuality and Method-school naturalism making him the prototype for every leading man that followed in his illustrious wake. "We are all Brando's children," admitted Jack Nicholson, the great man's co-star in 1976 western The Missouri Breaks. "He gave us our freedom."

The icon born Marlon Brando Jr on 3 April 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska claimed never to actually enjoy acting. That, of course, did not prevent this high-school dropout and one-time ditch-digger leaving his native Midwest to try his luck in New York City, just like his sisters had done before him. There he met Stella Adler, a student of the Stanislavski technique who tutored him in the Method style of emotion-based thesping for which he became famous.

 

Brando made his stage debut in 1943 and was swiftly voted Broadway's most promising actor. It was his astonishing turn in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire that put him on the map, however, Marlon making such a striking impression as the thuggish Stanley Kowalski he was inevitably asked to reprise his performance on screen. Now the toast of Hollywood, he followed it with Oscar-nominated roles in Viva Zapata and Julius Caesar before finally winning the award for On the Waterfront. Lest he get typecast as an inarticulate palooka, though, he stretched his wings by singing in Guys and Dolls, turning Japanese in The Teahouse of the August Moon and playing a Nazi in The Young Lions.

Dodgy choices and his increasingly petulant off-screen conduct saw Brando's stock fall in the 1960s, the actor himself being more interested in his political activism and new house in Tahiti than maintaining his box-office pulling power. In the 1970s, though, he returned triumphantly with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, scooping another Oscar for the former (which he refused) and stirring up controversy with the sexually-charged latter. In the years leading up to his death in 2004 at the age of 80, alas, his gargantuan weight saw him appear on screen less and less as his life was rocked by a series of personal tragedies.

 

Finest Moment:
"I coulda been a contender!" Having been guided to fame by Elia Kazan in the stage and screen productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando quickly returned the favour by giving the performance of his life in Kazan's 1954 thriller. As Terry Malloy, the slugger turned longshoreman who informs on the mobsters who've taken over his union, the star mumbled his way to an Oscar with a multi-layered turn that bleeds quiet heroism, moral conflict and wounded dignity. "If there's a better performance by a man in the history of American film, I don't know what it is," marvelled Kazan.
 
In His Own Words:
"Acting is an empty and useless profession."

 

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