Brando, Marlon

Related Category: Film and Television: Biographies

1924–2004, American film actor, often described as the greatest of his generation, b. Omaha, Nebr. Regarded as the foremost practitioner of “method” acting as taught by American disciples of Constantin Stanislavsky at New York's Actor's Studio, the young Brando combined a rough sex appeal with a powerful immediacy and a naturalistic performance style, one which revolutionized and transformed the art of screen acting. He made his film debut as a bitter paraplegic veteran in The Men (1950). His stage reputation was firmly established with his Broadway performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a role he later committed to film (1951). His early film roles included a Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952), Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1953), a motorcycle-riding rebel in The Wild One (1954), a battered dockworker in On the Waterfront (1954; Academy Award), and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls (1955).

Brando made his directorial debut with One-Eyed Jacks (1961), in which he also starred. After appearing in a number of mainly forgettable movies during the late 1950s and 60s, he created two of his most acclaimed roles in 1972 films: Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, in which he played a memorable Mafia patriarch and for which he won (and subsequently refused) the Academy Award, and Bernard Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, an erotic tour de force that created considerable controversy on its release. Brando continued to appear in many films, including in supporting roles in Missouri Breaks (1976), Apocalypse Now (1979), A Dry White Season (1988), and The Freshman (1990) and as a costar in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), The Brave (1997), and The Score (2001).

See his autobiography (1994); L. Grobel, Conversations with Brando (rev. ed. 1999); biographies by D. Downing (1984), N. Bly (1994), P. Manso (1994), P. Ryan (1994), R. Schickel (rev. ed. 1999), and P. Bosworth (2001); studies by T. Thomas (1973), B. Braithwaite (1977), and R. Tanitch (1994).