Brando, Marlon

▪ 2005

      American actor (b. April 3, 1924, Omaha, Neb.—d. July 1, 2004, Los Angeles, Calif.), brought a revolutionary new attitude to film acting in the 1950s—finding small details that added dimension to and insight into his characters and employing a raw, visceral, spontaneous, and naturalistic delivery instead of the deliberate, controlled style that most actors usually employed—and became an icon for generations of Method actors. Although his early performances led many people to consider him the finest actor of the 20th century, much of his later work was erratic and disappointed his audience. After his expulsion from a military school during his senior year, Brando moved (1943) to New York City. There he studied acting at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. He made his Broadway debut in I Remember Mama (1944). Three years and several shows later, Brando burst into Broadway stardom with his sensually brutal portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. He made his motion picture debut in 1950 in The Men, and in 1951 he returned to the character of Kowalski for the film version of Streetcar, garnering his first Academy Award nomination. He was nominated again for Viva Zapata! (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953) and played one of his most famous roles, the leader of a motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1953), before winning his first best-actor Oscar for the role that many considered his finest performance—as Terry Malloy, an ex-boxer who lost his chance to be a contender when he threw a fight but later finds the inner strength to testify about union corruption on the docks, in On the Waterfront (1954). Brando followed with a string of uneven efforts, including Guys and Dolls (1955), Sayonara (1957), for which he received another Oscar nomination, and One-Eyed Jacks (1961), which he also directed, before returning to form, and another Oscar win, in The Godfather (1972). Although he refused that award in protest against Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans, he was nominated again in 1974 for his intense performance in the sexually explicit L'ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris). Among Brando's few films over the next several years were Superman (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), A Dry White Season (1989), for which he was nominated for a best-supporting-actor Oscar, The Freshman (1990), in which he spoofed his Godfather character, and Don Juan DeMarco (1995), considered the most popular of his last films. Brando published an autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, in 1994.

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