Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, the third child and only son of Marlon Brando Sr., a salesman of chemical products, and Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, an amateur actress active in the Omaha Community Playhouse ^[1]. The household was troubled. Both parents drank heavily, and Brando later described his father as cold and belittling and his mother as loving but unreliable. The family moved to Evanston, Illinois, in 1930 and later settled in Libertyville, a small town north of Chicago ^[1].

As a boy Brando was rebellious and indifferent to schoolwork, though he showed a gift for mimicry that startled adults around him. His mother, who had once encouraged a young Henry Fonda at the Omaha playhouse, gave him his first exposure to theater ^[2]. After he was expelled from Libertyville High School, his father sent him to Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, where his father had also studied. Brando lasted until his final year, when he was expelled for insubordination ^[1].

Rather than return home, the nineteen year old dug ditches briefly and then followed his sisters Jocelyn and Frances to New York City in 1943. A back injury from his time at Shattuck kept him out of military service during the Second World War, which left him free to pursue acting at a moment when many young men his age were overseas ^[2].

In New York, Brando enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, where he studied with Stella Adler, a teacher whose approach drew on the ideas of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky ^[3]. Adler pressed her students to build characters from imagination and observation rather than from mechanical technique, and she quickly identified Brando as an extraordinary talent. He absorbed her lessons faster than any classmate, and the two remained close for the rest of her life ^[3].

His Broadway debut came in 1944 in the sentimental hit I Remember Mama, in which he played the fifteen year old son Nels. Critics took notice of his ease and freshness. Roles followed in Truckline Cafe in 1946 and in Candida opposite Katharine Cornell, and though some of those productions closed quickly, insiders in the New York theater began speaking of him as the most promising young actor of his generation ^[2].

The breakthrough arrived in December 1947, when Brando opened as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan ^[4]. His raw, physically charged portrayal of the brutish New Orleans workingman electrified audiences and reviewers alike. At 23, he had given a performance that would be discussed for decades, and Hollywood came calling almost immediately.

Brando made his film debut in The Men in 1950, playing a paraplegic veteran, and prepared by spending weeks in a hospital ward with injured servicemen ^[2]. A year later he repeated his Kowalski role in Kazan's film of A Streetcar Named Desire, earning the first of four consecutive Academy Award nominations for best actor. Nominations followed for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and for his Mark Antony in the 1953 film of Julius Caesar, a performance that surprised skeptics who doubted he could handle Shakespeare ^[1].

The most celebrated Marlon Brando achievements of the decade came in 1954 with On the Waterfront, again directed by Kazan. As Terry Malloy, a longshoreman and failed boxer who testifies against a corrupt union, Brando won his first Academy Award for best actor ^[4]. The taxi scene with Rod Steiger, in which Terry tells his brother he could have been a contender, became one of the most quoted passages in American film. That same decade he played a motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One in 1953, a role that fixed his image as a symbol of restless postwar youth ^[2].

After an uneven stretch through the 1960s, when expensive projects such as the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty damaged his commercial standing, Brando staged one of the great comebacks in Hollywood history. In 1972 he played Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, transforming himself with cotton padded cheeks, a rasping voice, and an aging mobster's weary authority ^[5]. The performance won him a second Academy Award for best actor. He declined the prize, sending a young Apache activist, Sacheen Littlefeather, to the ceremony to protest Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans ^[5]. The following year he earned another nomination for the sexually explicit French production Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci ^[1].

Among essential Marlon Brando facts is the scale of his later paydays. He earned enormous fees for relatively brief appearances, most famously as Jor-El in Superman in 1978 and as the deranged Colonel Kurtz in Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 1979, a role for which he appeared mostly in shadow ^[5]. He received a final Academy Award nomination as a supporting actor for the 1989 apartheid drama A Dry White Season, bringing his career total to eight nominations and two wins ^[1].

Brando's private life was as turbulent as his screen roles. He married three times: to actress Anna Kashfi in 1957, to Mexican actress Movita Castaneda in 1960, and to Tarita Teriipaia, his Tahitian costar from Mutiny on the Bounty, in 1962 ^[1]. All three marriages ended in divorce. He fathered numerous children with his wives and with other partners, and estimates of the total have varied; biographers generally count at least eleven ^[6].

While filming Mutiny on the Bounty in French Polynesia, Brando fell in love with the region and in 1966 purchased Tetiaroa, an atoll north of Tahiti, which became his refuge from Hollywood for the rest of his life ^[6]. He spoke often of the island as the one place where he felt at peace, and he pursued plans there for environmental research and low impact development.

He was also a committed political activist. Brando marched in the 1963 civil rights demonstrations, supported the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and gave money and public backing to Native American causes, including the occupation at Wounded Knee in 1973 ^[5]. His Oscar refusal in 1973 was of a piece with decades of such engagement, not an isolated stunt. In 1994 he published an autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, written with Robert Lindsey, in which he discussed his childhood, his craft, and his ambivalence about fame ^[7].

The final decades brought heavy sorrow. In May 1990 his eldest son, Christian Brando, shot and killed Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of Brando's daughter Cheyenne, at the family home on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. Christian pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served time in prison, and Brando testified tearfully at the sentencing ^[6]. Cheyenne, who struggled with mental illness after the killing, died by suicide in Tahiti in 1995 at the age of 25. Friends said Brando never recovered from her death ^[6].

His screen appearances grew rare and eccentric. He earned strong notices and a Golden Globe nomination for the 1990 comedy The Freshman, in which he gently parodied his Godfather persona, but later projects such as The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996 were marked by production chaos ^[2]. His last film role came in the 2001 heist picture The Score alongside Robert De Niro and Edward Norton ^[1].

Brando's health declined through his seventies as he battled obesity, diabetes, and pulmonary fibrosis. He lived reclusively in Los Angeles, communicating with friends largely by telephone. He died of respiratory failure at a Los Angeles hospital on July 1, 2004, at the age of 80 ^[8]. His ashes were scattered partly in Tahiti and partly in Death Valley.

Any serious Marlon Brando biography must reckon with his effect on the craft itself. Before him, mainstream screen acting favored polish and clear diction; after him, mumbled speech, improvisation, and visible inner conflict became legitimate tools. Actors including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Johnny Depp have named him as a formative influence, and critics routinely rank his Terry Malloy and Vito Corleone among the finest performances ever filmed ^[4].

The American Film Institute placed him fourth on its 1999 list of the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood ^[9]. On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and A Streetcar Named Desire have all been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, a measure of how central his work remains to the national film heritage ^[4].

His island of Tetiaroa also carries his name forward. After his death, a resort called The Brando opened there in 2014 under an agreement he had explored in his lifetime, paired with an ecological research station that reflects his environmental interests ^[6]. Complicated, self-sabotaging, and often contemptuous of his own profession, Brando nonetheless left film acting permanently changed. That paradox, a man who distrusted acting yet redefined it, is the core of his story.