The Legend of MARLON BRANDO

If Steve McQueen is ‘The King of Cool’, then Marlon Brando must be the Emperor of Cool. Or maybe even The God. The man had an inhuman presence that was unmatched throughout film history. His innate ability to portray a range of emotions convincingly, from the depths of darkness to soaring heights of emotional expression, earned him solid respect throughout the film industry, and beyond.

“If there’s anything unsettling to the stomach, it’s watching actors
on television talk about their personal lives.” - Marlon Brando

As a young sex symbol, he is best known for his roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and his Academy Award-winning performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s.

In middle age, his well-known roles include his Academy Award-winning performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, both directed by Francis Ford Coppola and an Academy Award-nominated performance as Paul in Last Tango in Paris.

His fierce body of work spanned over half a century. He was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute, and part of Time magazine’s Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.

Brando’s impact on film acting was seismic. He became known as the foremost example of the “method” acting style, and was initially much parodied for his “mumbling” diction, but his mercurial, often uncategorizable performances were held in the highest regard among his peers.

Director Martin Scorsese said, “He is the marker. There’s ‘before Brando’ and ‘after Brando’.” Actor Jack Nicholson once said, “When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one.”

No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams‘ A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando.

“The only reason I’m in Hollywood is that I don’t have
the moral courage to refuse the money.”
- Marlon Brando

Born Marlon Brando Jr. on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Pennebaker, “Bud” Brando was one of three children. His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. He attributed “Brando” to his great-great-grandmother whose last name was spelled “Brandeau”. She was a 5th generation descendant of Louis DuBois, a French Huguenot refugee whom, with 11 others, founded New Paltz, NY.

However, it was “Brandow” for at least 4 generations until his great-grandfather, James, shortened it to “Brando”. Brando was also of Swiss and Prussian heritage through his paternal great-great-great-great grandmother, Annatje Lehnann, and of Irish heritage through his maternal great-grandfather, Myles Gahan, who immigrated to the United States from Ireland.

Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career.

"Nobody's gonna tell ME what to do..."

Expelled from high school for riding a motorcycle through the halls, (!?!) he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation. Brando then went on to use his own Triumph 6T Thunderbird in The Wild One (1953).

Marlon Brando and…. Marlon Brando.

Brando was an activist, lending his presence to many issues, including the American Civil Rights and American Indian Movements. He had said that the only reason he continued to make movies was in order to raise the money to produce what he said would be the “definitive” film about Native Americans. The film was never made. He helped a lot of minorities in America, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native American Indians.

Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972) (“Last Tango in Paris”) when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. “I don’t have many good memories,” Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood.

Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando’s first wife Anna Kashfi, “I admire Marlon’s talent, but I don’t envy the pain that created it.”

If nothing else, it gave him the determination and drive to turn himself from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowle
dgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.

Aors as James Dean – who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando – the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the “New Brando,” such as Warren Beatty in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961). “We are all Brando’s children,” Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. “He gave us our freedom.” He was truly “The Godfather” of American acting – and he was just 30 years old.

It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean – who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando – the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the “New Brando,” such as Warren Beatty in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961). “We are all Brando’s children,” Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. “He gave us our freedom.” He was truly “The Godfather” of American acting – and he was just 30 years old.

In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother’s maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.

Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Chase (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every “Reflections,” though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) and The Night of the Following Day (1968). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Queimada (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director’s chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor.

By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Richard Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama.

Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-’50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor.

However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field.

Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is “created” in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art.

Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film’s performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando’s discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as “they” were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of “they” and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.

Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when “LIFE” magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of  The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.

Brando owned a private island off the Pacific coast, the Polynesian atoll known as Tetiaroa, from 1966 until his death in 2004.