Marlon Brando

• 1. Introduction

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  Marlon Brando Jr. was born on the 3rd of April 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, and by the time he died on the 1st of July 2004, he had remade what it means to act on screen. He collected two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, three BAFTAs, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and a Primetime Emmy. He is credited with bringing the Stanislavski system of acting to mainstream audiences. Yet for much of his life, Brando himself seemed uncomfortable with the very art that made him famous. He described his middle-aged years as the "Fuck You Years." He sold back his profit points in The Godfather for $100,000, a sum that cost him an estimated $11 million. He arrived on the set of Apocalypse Now overweight and admitted he had not read the source novel. How does a man who described actors before him as predictable as breakfast cereals become the standard by which all acting is judged? That question runs through everything that follows.

• 2. A Troubled Beginning

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  Brando's father, Marlon Brando Sr., was a salesman who frequently travelled out of state, while his mother Dorothy Pennebaker was a stage actress often absent from home. Her absences caused a young Brando to bond deeply with the family housekeeper, who eventually left to marry, a departure that left him with what those close to him described as abandonment issues. In 1930, when Brando was six, the family moved to Evanston, Illinois, where he met Wally Cox, a friendship that would last until Cox's death in 1973. Brando attended Libertyville High School, excelling at sports and drama but failing every other subject. He was held back a year and expelled in 1941. His father then sent him to Shattuck Military Academy, where Brando Sr. had also studied. There, Brando excelled at acting until 1943, when he was put on probation for insubordination during military maneuvers. He sneaked off campus, was caught, and faculty voted to expel him, though students argued the punishment was too harsh. Rather than return the following year as he was invited to do, Brando dropped out entirely. He tried to enlist in the Army, but a football injury sustained at Shattuck had left him with a trick knee, and he was classified physically unfit for military service. That rejection sent him toward New York, where his two elder sisters, Jocelyn and Frances, had already gone. It was the only direction left open to him.

• 3. Stella Adler and the New Approach

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  Brando studied at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, part of the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, under influential German director Erwin Piscator. He became an avid student of Stella Adler, from whom he absorbed the Stanislavski system, a technique that encouraged the actor to explore both internal and external aspects of a character to fully realize them. Adler would later recount a classroom exercise she gave Brando: she instructed the class to act like chickens and told them a nuclear bomb was about to fall. Most students clucked and ran wildly. Brando sat calmly and pretended to lay an egg. When Adler asked why, he said, "I'm a chicken -- what do I know about bombs?" His instinct was already evident. George Englund, who knew Brando during this period, said Brando embraced acting in New York because "he was accepted there. He wasn't criticized. It was the first time in his life that he heard good things about himself." Despite being widely labeled a method actor, Brando sharply rejected Lee Strasberg's teachings, later writing that Strasberg "was an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio." Brando insisted it was Adler and later Elia Kazan who taught him. In his 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon, he said that before his generation, actors were like breakfast cereals: predictable. His approach, developed under Adler, was to make dialogue feel as natural as an ordinary conversation. He would talk to crew members about their weekends even after the director called action, and only begin the scripted dialogue once he felt that ease.

• 4. Broadway to The Waterfront

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  Brando made his Broadway debut in the bittersweet drama I Remember Mama in 1944, playing the son of Mady Christians. New York Drama Critics voted him "Most Promising Young Actor" for his role in Truckline Cafe. He won Theater World Awards for his performances in Candida and Truckline Cafe in 1946. In 1945, Brando's agent recommended a co-starring role alongside Tallulah Bankhead in The Eagle Has Two Heads. Bankhead recognized Brando's potential despite her contempt for method acting, but the two clashed enormously during the pre-Broadway tour. Producer Jack Wilson reached his limit when Brando mumbled through a dress rehearsal shortly before the 28th of November 1946, opening. Wilson demanded results; Brando raised his voice and delivered a performance of great power and passion. "It was marvelous," a cast member recalled. But when Bankhead eventually dismissed him from the production, she wrote to Tennessee Williams about A Streetcar Named Desire, offering an endorsement that was equal parts vindictive and accurate: she suggested Brando was "a total pig of a man without sensitivity or grace of any kind" and therefore perfect for Stanley Kowalski. John Garfield had been Kazan's first choice for the role, but made impossible demands, leaving the less experienced and technically too young Brando as the fallback. Williams wrote to his agent Audrey Wood in a letter dated the 29th of August 1947, calling Brando's reading "by far the best reading I have ever heard," and explaining that Brando's youth humanized Stanley's brutality. For his film debut in The Men (1950), Brando spent a month in bed at the Birmingham Army Hospital in Van Nuys to prepare to play a paraplegic veteran. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote that Brando's performance was "so vividly real, dynamic and sensitive that his illusion is complete." By 1954, producer Sam Spiegel had signed Brando to play Irish-American stevedore Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront for $100,000, a film Brando had initially resisted because of Kazan's 1952 testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had named colleagues as subversives. During filming, Brando convinced Kazan that the scripted version of the famous "contender" scene was unrealistic: the script called for the entire scene to play with a gun pointed at Brando. Brando insisted Terry would never believe his brother would pull the trigger and gently pushed the gun aside. Kazan later said, "If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is." On the Waterfront earned an estimated $4.2 million in rentals at the North American box office in 1954 and brought Brando his first Academy Award for Best Actor.

• 5. The Difficult Middle Years

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  After the critical and commercial triumph of Sayonara in 1957, which earned 10 Academy Award nominations and was the last year Brando ranked among the Top Ten Box Office Stars, his career entered a long decline. In 1961, he made his directorial debut with the western One-Eyed Jacks. The picture had originally been directed by Stanley Kubrick, who was fired early in production. Paramount gave Brando control. His habit of multiple retakes and character exploration, useful as an actor, proved costly as a director: the shoot stretched to six months instead of the expected three, and costs doubled to more than six million dollars. Paramount took the film away from him. Shortly afterward, on the set of Mutiny on the Bounty, he was accused of deliberately sabotaging the production. On the 16th of June 1962, The Saturday Evening Post ran a headline: "Six million dollars down the drain: the mutiny of Marlon Brando." Studios began to fear his reputation. In 1961, Brando signed a five-picture deal with Universal Studios that he later called a haunting decision; all five films, including Bedtime Story (1964), The Appaloosa (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), and The Night of the Following Day (1969), were critical and commercial failures. He cited the 1969 film Burn! as his personal favorite among all his work, writing in his memoir that director Gillo Pontecorvo was the best director he had ever worked with after Kazan and Bertolucci, yet the film met a hostile reception from critics. Pauline Kael wrote in the March 1966 issue of The Atlantic that Brando and those like him had become "buffoons, shamelessly, pathetically mocking their public reputations." Brando later admitted in Listen to Me Marlon that criticism hurt deeply despite his pose of indifference: "They can hit you every day and you have no way of fighting back. I was very convincing in my pose of indifference, but I was very sensitive and it hurt a lot." By the time The Godfather entered production, critics had written him off entirely, and he had not appeared in a box office hit since The Young Lions in 1958.

• 6. The Godfather and Last Tango

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  Paramount Pictures President Stanley Jaffe told director Francis Ford Coppola, "As long as I'm president of this studio, Marlon Brando will not be in this picture." Jaffe eventually relented but set three conditions: Brando would accept a fee far below his usual rate; he would accept financial responsibility for any production delays caused by his behavior; and he would submit to a screen test. Coppola persuaded Brando to do a videotaped make-up test in which Brando did his own makeup, stuffing cotton balls into his cheeks to simulate the character's puffed face. Charles Bluhdorn, president of Paramount parent Gulf+Western, saw the test and asked in amazement, "What are we watching? Who is this old guinea?" Brando was signed for $50,000, but negotiated a sliding-scale percentage of the gross: 1% for each $10 million over a $10 million threshold, up to 5% if the picture exceeded $60 million. According to Evans, Brando sold those points back for $100,000 because he needed cash. "That $100,000 cost him $11 million," Evans claimed. Brando was surrounded on set by rising stars Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and Diane Keaton, and served as a stabilizing force for the production, even threatening to walk off the picture when he learned executives were pressing Coppola to fire Pacino. When the Academy Award for Best Actor was announced, Brando declined it, becoming the second actor to refuse the award after George C. Scott. He sent actress Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony, where she announced that Brando was rejecting the Oscar in protest of "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry." The Wounded Knee Occupation was occurring at the time of the ceremony. He had written a longer speech for her to read, but time constraints prevented it. Brando followed The Godfather with Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), in which he played a recent American widower beginning an anonymous sexual relationship with a young Parisian woman. The film's sexual content generated enormous controversy. Bertolucci described Brando as "a monster as an actor and a darling as a human being." Brando refused to speak to Bertolucci for fifteen years after filming. His gross participation deal on Last Tango earned him $3 million, and the film placed him on the list of Top Ten Box Office Stars for the last time.

• 7. Final Years and Legacy

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  In 1978, Brando played Superman's father Jor-El in Superman. He was paid $3.7 million for two weeks of work, a figure revealed in a documentary on the 2001 DVD release. When producers refused to pay him the same percentage for the sequel, he denied them permission to use footage he had already filmed. He won a Primetime Emmy for his portrayal of George Lincoln Rockwell in the 1979 miniseries Roots: The Next Generations, then took a nine-year hiatus from acting. In 1989, he returned for A Dry White Season, based on Andre Brink's 1979 anti-apartheid novel, agreeing to perform for free. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He appeared alongside Johnny Depp in the 1995 box office hit Don Juan DeMarco and in Depp's controversial 1997 film The Brave, which was never released in the United States. In his final years, Brando weighed over 300 lb and suffered from type 2 diabetes. He held several patents issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, all involving a method of tensioning drumheads, with patents issued between June 2002 and November 2004. He made sketches as a hobby. He spent considerable time at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch; Brando's son Miko had served as Jackson's bodyguard and assistant for several years. In Brando's last days, when breathing with an oxygen mask was necessary, Jackson provided a golf cart with a portable oxygen tank so Brando could tour the ranch's trees and flowers. Shortly before his death, and despite needing that oxygen mask, Brando recorded a line for the video game The Godfather, once again voicing Don Vito Corleone. He died on the 1st of July 2004, of respiratory failure from pulmonary fibrosis with congestive heart failure at the UCLA Medical Center. His last completed film, The Score (2001), in which he starred alongside Robert De Niro as a fence, had been received generally positively, closing a career that had run from a Broadway stage in 1944 to a recording booth in his final weeks.