Marlon Brando
Why was Marlon Brando such a force in American theatre and film? Brando created a visceral style of acting that overwhelmed colleagues, audiences, and actor training. Born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, Brando rebelled at any early age. His father offered to finance any career choice he wanted, as long as he actually chose a career. Brando chose acting. He went to New York to study, first with Stella Adler, and then with Lee Strasberg. These acting teachers were in the process of redefining actor training in this country, to put the lived-through emotions of a moment as the actor’s central point of focus, and Brando became their star student. Brando’s first Broadway play was I Remember Mama (1944), followed by Truckline Cafe (1946) for which critics voted him Broadway’s most promising actor. The 1947 production of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan, brought Brando center stage as the raging Stanley Kowalski, and Hollywood caught on. Amazingly, Brando would be nominated by the Academy for four straight years for a best actor award: the screen version of Streetcar (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), finally winning for On the Waterfront (1954), the same year he starred in the now-classic The Wild One. His last stage appearance was the Boston production of Arms and the Man in 1953. Brando’s career became as outsized as his acting. In 1960, he formed his own production company to make a new film. Both Stanley Kubrick and then Sam Peckinpah left the director’s position because they found working with Brando too difficult, so Brando himself took over the directing for 1961's One-Eyed Jacks. Brando’s work in the sixties included a string of movies that did not connect with an audience: The Ugly American (1963), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Candy (1968), Queimada! (1969), The Nightcomers (1971). His second Oscar finally came for his role as Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972. Brando hired an actress to decline the Oscar and give a speech about the United States’ crimes against Native Americans. Although Brando made no secret of his willingness to act in almost anything for the money, he also continued to create a few classics (Last Tango in Paris (1973) directed by Bernardo Bertolucci; Apocalypse Now (1979) directed by Coppola), and he found a new generation of fans with A Dry White Season (1983) and Don Juan DeMarco with Johnny Depp (1995). Brando died in 2004. He left behind a legacy that still informs an audience’s expectation of seeing acting that is emotionally accessible, powerful, and real.
