Marlon Brando; NY Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
I won't be able to tell you whether it's above or below the
fold until I get the hard copy. I'm guessing above.
July 2, 2004
Marlon Brando, Oscar-Winning Actor, Is Dead at 80
By RICK LYMAN NY Times
Marlon Brando, the rebellious prodigy who electrified a
generation and forever transformed the art of screen acting,
yet whose erratic career, obstinate eccentricities and
recurring tragedies prevented him from fully realizing the
promise of his early genius, is dead. He was 80.
His lawyer, David J. Seeley, said Mr. Brando died on
Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital that Mr. Seeley did not
identify, The Associated Press reported. The cause of death
was being also withheld, Mr. Seeley said.
Young audiences who knew Mr. Brando as a tabloid curiosity
with his own private island off Tahiti, or simply an
overweight target for late-night comics, might be surprised
to learn that at one time, he was a truly revolutionary
presence who strode through American popular culture like
lightning on legs.
Certainly among the handful of enduringly great American
film actors - some say the greatest - he has also been,
without question, the most widely imitated. Virtually all of
the finest male stars who have emerged in the last
half-century, from Paul Newman to Warren Beatty to Robert De
Niro to Leonardo DiCaprio, contain some echo of Mr. Brando's
world-shaking paradigm.
Simply put: In film acting, there is before Brando, and
there is after Brando. And they are like different planets.
Yet like Orson Welles, another famous prodigy who battled
Hollywood only to see himself balloon into a cartoon version
of his early brilliance, Mr. Brando's legacy is built on a
surprisingly small number of roles.
There is his epochal Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee
Williams's "Streetcar Named Desire," a role he created on
Broadway in 1947, at age 23, and then played on film in
1951. And there is his performance as the fatally noble
Mexican bandit in "Viva Zapata!" in 1952. Two crucial roles
followed in 1954, as the first in a long line of
leather-clad, mixed-up teenagers in "The Wild One" and in
his Oscar-winning turn as Terry Malloy, the boxer who could
have been a contender, in "On the Waterfront," which many
consider his finest performance.
After that explosion of creative fire, there follows a huge
gap of years filled with intermittently compelling but
largely unmemorable roles - and more than a few outright
disasters - before a stunning return to form with "The
Godfather" in 1972 and "Last Tango in Paris" in 1973.
Through it all, Mr. Brando was an often combative and moody
iconoclast, a polarizing and enigmatic figure who generally
stayed out of the public eye. When he did speak, about
acting, about politics, about genetic engineering, about any
of the passions that worked on his rambling mind, he
revealed a strange mixture of self-abnegation and egomania.
A startling number of the increasingly rare interviews he
gave were simply jousting matches between him and the
interviewer, all about how much he hated doing it or how he
wanted to expose the whole process as a phony, commercial
exercise. On the few occasions when he seemed to let loose
and speak what was really on his fertile mind, such as in a
crushing profile by Truman Capote in the New Yorker in 1957
or in a pair of truly odd appearances on "Larry King Live"
in the mid-1990's, he got himself into trouble.
And more often than not, he would express contempt for the
craft of acting.
"Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts," Mr. Brando
once said. "Whenever we want something from somebody or when
we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most
people do it all day long."
He described himself as a lazy man, always looking for ways
to make more money for less work. Notoriously lax about
learning his lines, he would sometimes have them written on
cards just out of camera view. Supporters said this added
spontaneity to his performances.
"If a studio offered to pay me as much to sweep the floor as
it did to act, I'd sweep the floor," he said. "There isn't
anything that pays you as well as acting while you decide
what the hell you're going to do with yourself. Who cares
about the applause? Do I need applause to feel good about
myself?"
Yet, he could be as meticulous and penetrating as anyone
when discussing a particular role. And no one was better at
finding brilliant touches that brought a character to life.
Many have pointed to a scene in "On the Waterfront" during
which he delicately put on the dainty lace glove of the
young woman he was awkwardly trying to court, a seemingly
unconscious gesture that fills the moment with
heart-breaking vulnerability.
In preparing for his first film role, as a wounded veteran
in "The Men" (1950), he spent weeks living among real
soldiers at a veterans' hospital, to the point that many of
the film's first audiences came away perplexed, thinking
that he was an actual war casualty who had been hired to be
in the movie.
And for a man who supposedly disdained acting, he could be
extraordinarily eloquent on the subject.
"The close-up says everything," Mr. Brando once said. "It's
then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes
most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously,
at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is
only inches away, and your face becomes the stage."
He was not the first actor to bring to the screen the style
known as the Method, an internalized acting technique
promulgated in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski in the
1920's and then popularized in New York in the 40's by its
evangelists like Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and Stella
Adler, Mr. Brando's beloved teacher. But Mr. Brando was the
first to make clear how truly powerful and culture-shaking
the Method could be, in the right hands.
"His brutish explosions of anger, his displays of vanity on
stage were seen by pretentious and unpretentious reviewers
alike as having an immediacy new to the theater," Harold
Brodkey wrote in The New Yorker in 1994.
What made Mr. Brando different from previous Method actors
like Montgomery Clift, Mr. Brodkey wrote, was the way he
taunted and unsettled the audience. ("You could write a
whole chapter on the ways he could make people feel
uncomfortable," said an early acting colleague quoted by the
Brando biographer Peter Manso.)
To American audiences who first saw him in the late 40's,
what was most apparent about Mr. Brando was that compared
with other actors of the period, he was brooding, muscular
and intense. Detractors called him a slob. He appeared in
tight blue jeans and torn T-shirts, grimy with sweat,
alternately slack jawed with stupidity and alive with feral
cunning. And he was more openly sexual - in an animal way -
than the actors who immediately preceded him. Often, Mr.
Brando was accused of mumbling his lines, but audiences
watching those early performances today would notice none of
that, so completely has the Brando school of antiglamour
taken root in American acting.
"Brando represented a reaction against the postwar mania for
security," Pauline Kael wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in
1966. "As a protagonist, the Brando of the early 50's had no
code, only his instincts. He was a development from the
gangster and the outlaw."
This anti-authoritarian streak was like catnip to the
generation that came of age right after World War II. In
"The Wild One," Mr. Brando's reluctantly sensitive biker is
asked by a small-town matron what it is that he's rebelling
against. "What've you got?" he responds. That line, that
attitude, galvanized the emerging postwar youth culture.
In "A Method to Their Madness," a 1984 history of the Actors
Studio, Foster Hirsch tried to explain what it was about the
young Mr. Brando and his fellow student, James Dean, that
set them apart from earlier actors like Gary Cooper or
Spencer Tracy, who had also cultivated a realistic screen
persona.
"They appeared to be more fully and interestingly alive on
screen than any generation of actors before them," he wrote.
"Their realism was deeper, more layered and more complex
than that of a Tracy or a Cooper. Brando and Dean were
fascinating neurotics, exuding a primeval sexuality.
Emotionally, they were knottier and more vulnerable than
actors had seemed before, daringly androgynous, even feral.
Reaching into their own psyches, they were intuitive and
spontaneous."
The impression given by many of the finest Method actors was
that they needed to act, to purge their inner demons. Mr.
Brando echoed this, saying that a childhood with remote and
alcoholic parents had driven him to pretending.
"When you are a child who is unwanted or unwelcome, and the
essence of what you are seems to be unacceptable, you look
for an identity that will be acceptable," he said.
Mr. Brando was born in 1924 in Omaha. In his 1994
autobiography, "Songs My Mother Taught Me," he described a
painful childhood. His father, Marlon Brando Sr., was an
abusive alcoholic, he said, who never seemed to find
anything good to say about his only son. His mother, Dorothy
Pennebaker Brando, was also an alcoholic, he said, more
interested in drinking than in caring for her family.
"I suppose the story of my life is a search for love," Mr.
Brando said. "But more than that, I have been looking for a
way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on
and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my
species."
The young boy's suppressed anger against his father was seen
by Mr. Brando and many critics as the wellspring for many of
his performances. After his father died, Mr. Brando told an
interviewer that he wished he could spend just a few more
minutes with him.
"I wanted to rip his ears off and eat them in front of him,"
Mr. Brando said. "I wanted to separate his larynx from his
body and shove it into his stomach. But with time, I began
to realize that as long as I felt this way, I would never be
free until I eradicated these feelings in myself."
In 1935, his parents separated and Mr. Brando and his two
older sisters, Florence and Jocelyn, moved with their mother
to Orange County, Calif. Two years later, his parents
reconciled, and the family moved to the northern Chicago
suburbs, first to Evanston and then to Libertyville, where
the teenaged Mr. Brando came of age.
He was an indifferent student, given to pranks. His father
sent him to the Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota, from
which he was expelled in his senior year for smoking and
insubordination.
There was another battle taking place in the Brando
household, between the values of his father, a middle-class
businessman, and his mother, a disappointed actress. By the
time the young Mr. Brando was kicked out of military school,
both of his sisters had moved to New York to forge acting
careers. Mr. Brando stayed in Libertyville for a while, then
followed his sisters to New York in 1943.
He enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for
Social Research. Mr. Brando seemed to understand the Method
instinctively, how to use his own reservoir of memories and
internalized emotions to find moments of truth. Indeed, some
of his fellow students said that teaching him the technique
was redundant.
"Marlon's going to school to learn the Method was like
sending a tiger to jungle school," Elaine Stritch said.
In a 1997 article in The New York Times on the 50th
anniversary of the Actors Studio, Ann Douglas described an
early acting exercise: "During one class, Stella Adler, Mr.
Brando's teacher, told her students to pretend to be
chickens on which an atomic bomb was about to fall. The rest
of the students ran around clucking loudly and looking
frantically at the sky, but Mr. Brando just sat there
calmly - he was a hen, busy laying her eggs. What would a
hen know or care about a bomb?"
Mr. Brando made his stage debut at the New School, playing
Jesus in a 1944 production of Gerhart Hauptmann's "Hannele."
Later that year, he joined the Broadway cast of "I Remember
Mama," and stayed there for two years.
In 1946, Mr. Brando appeared in several Plays - "Truckline
Cafe" by Maxwell Anderson, "Candida" by George Bernard Shaw,
"A Flag is Born" by Ben Hecht - before a brilliant young
director named Elia Kazan recommended him for the role of
Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire."
In 1947, in that role, he exploded onto the stage. Although
the play was written and presented largely as the story of
Blanche DuBois, the quintessentially neurotic Southern
belle, played by the brilliant Jessica Tandy, Mr. Brando was
all anyone could talk about.
The inspiration for Mr. Brando's costume - torn T-shirt,
extremely tight jeans - came from watching construction
workers at a site adjacent to the theater, said Lucinda
Ballard, the play's costume designer. Mr. Brando
painstakingly bulked up his muscles and then had a fitting
for the specially made jeans, insisting that he wear no
underwear for the fitting.
"His silences, even more than his speeches, are completely
arresting," the critic Harold Clurman wrote in 1948.
"Through his own intense concentration on what he is
thinking or doing at each moment he is on the stage, all our
attention focuses on him. Brando's quality is one of acute
sensitivity."
For three years, he parried offers from Hollywood until
finally he accepted the lead role in "The Men," drawn by the
character of the wounded war veteran.
The Hollywood establishment did not quite know what to make
of Mr. Brando. It never did.
In the early 50's, movie stars were expected to be models of
glamour when they appeared in public. Mr. Brando went around
in T-shirts and blue jeans. He was often spotted driving
down Sunset Boulevard in a convertible wearing a fake arrow
that seemed to penetrate his head.
"Nobody, nothing, no amount of money can make him behave,"
said a profile in The Times Magazine in 1954. "He's got to
be his own master, even though he may not yet have mastered
himself."
Mr. Brando did not seem to care what Hollywood thought of
him. "The only reason I'm here is that I don't yet have the
moral courage to turn down the money," he said.
"The Men" was followed in 1951 with the film version of "A
Streetcar Named Desire," in which Mr. Brando had the same
effect on movie audiences that he had had on Broadway.
Hollywood, however, kept its distance. Though the film won
Oscars for Vivien Leigh's Blanche, as well as for supporting
performers Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, Mr. Brando was passed
over.
In 1952, Mr. Brando starred again for Mr. Kazan in "Viva
Zapata!" - a political paean to revolutionaries, with a John
Steinbeck script. Again, a supporting performer, Anthony
Quinn, took home the Oscar and Mr. Brando was overlooked.
In 1953, trying to prove he was more than a mumbling,
one-note performer, Mr. Brando played Marc Antony in a film
of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." Again, he was nominated
for an Oscar. Again, he lost.
Hollywood's snubbing of Mr. Brando was getting to be a
little embarrassing. Although he was widely proclaimed by
critics as the greatest actor of his generation, and
embraced at the box-office in film after film, his disdain
for the establishment was returned in kind.
Finally, in 1954, in "On the Waterfront," he received an
Oscar. The role of Terry Malloy, more than any other, is
emblematic of the power and reach of the style of acting
that Mr. Brando brought to the screen.
"If there is a better performance by a man in the history of
film, I don't know what it is," said Mr. Kazan, his director
again.
Hollywood had finally embraced Mr. Brando. At the Academy
Award ceremonies, he even joked with the M.C., Bob Hope,
wrestling over the Oscar he had just won. It seemed to
presage greater glories but proved to be the end of the most
fertile period in his professional life.
To avoid a lawsuit, for walking off a big-budget
extravaganza called "The Egyptian," Mr. Brando agreed to
play Napoleon in another lavish romance called "Desiree" and
essentially walked through the role. He admitted as much.
Time put him on its cover. "Too big for his blue jeans?" the
cover headline asked.
In 1955, he was miscast again, this time as a singing
gangster in "Guys and Dolls." And then, in 1956, he dressed
up as an Okinawan villager for "The Teahouse of the August
Moon."
More and more, he seemed to be receding behind his makeup.
And he developed a growing reputation for being difficult.
It was while filming "Sayonara" (1957) that Mr. Brando
agreed to an interview with Truman Capote for The New
Yorker. The resulting article, "The Duke in His Own Domain,"
was a patronizing portrait of a somewhat dim prima donna.
"People around me never say anything," Mr. Brando said.
"They just seem to want to hear what I have to say. That's
why I do all the talking." Mr. Capote expressed astonishment
that Mr. Brando objected to the piece.
"The unwary Brando was made to look public ass No. 1," Ms.
Kael said. "It was now open season on Brando."
Certainly, the tide had turned. To some, the brilliant
prodigy had become the spoiled, aging adolescent. He fought
back, with performances that showed flashes of his earlier
brilliance in "The Young Lions" (1958) and "The Fugitive
Kind" (1959). In 1961, he turned to directing for the first
and only time, starring himself in a quirky, almost sadistic
anti-Western called "One-Eyed Jacks."
His fortunes were supposed to be revived by an expensive
remake of "Mutiny on the Bounty." Instead, it became the
most celebrated movie disaster of its day.
In a 1962 Saturday Evening Post piece on the debacle, the
director Billy Wilder, who had worked on the script,
recounted that when he was introduced to John F. Kennedy,
the president leaned over and asked, "When in the world are
they going to finish `Mutiny on the Bounty?' "
At the time, the film had been in production for 11 months,
after 13 months of preparations, and it was still months
from completion. The budget had soared to nearly $20
million, a huge sum in those days. And its star, Mr. Brando,
had likewise ballooned, from 170 to 210 pounds, the first
occurrence of a problem that would plague him for the rest
of his life.
Nearly everyone blamed Mr. Brando for the film's problems.
"They deserve what they get when they give a ham actor, a
petulant child, complete control of an expensive picture,"
said the director, Lewis Milestone. Mr. Brando's co-stars
concurred. "The man is unprofessional and absolutely
ridiculous," Trevor Howard said.
The film, which opened in 1962, was a box-office disaster.
It would be a long time before a Hollywood studio would
again star Mr. Brando in an expensive production.
The rest of the 1960's were a string of uneven films of
steadily decreasing impact, beginning with "The Ugly
American" in 1963 and including such oddities as Charles
Chaplin's "A Countess from Hong Kong" in 1967 and Gilo
Pontecorvos "Burn!" in 1969.
Mr. Brando seemed bored with acting and increasingly remote.
He had fallen in love with Tahiti while making "Bounty," as
well as with his co-star, Tarita Teriipia. So in 1966 he
simply bought his own island, Tetiaroa, a sickle of palm and
sand surrounding a green lagoon about 30 miles north of
Tahiti.
For the rest of his life, he split his time between his
South Pacific island and his estate on Mulholland Drive,
above Beverly Hills.
His first marriage, to Anna Kashfi, had dissolved in 1958
after a little more than a year. A subsequent child custody
battle put Mr. Brando on the tabloid covers when his ex-wife
publicly slapped him after a Santa Monica court hearing.
A second wife, Movita Castenada, also an actress, married
him in 1960 and that, too, was over by 1962.
"Is Brando Necessary?" asked a Film Comment headline in
1969.
Hollywood did not think so. By the time Francis Ford Coppola
was casting about for an actor to play the role of Vito
Corleone in his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo's "The
Godfather," Mr. Brando's was nowhere on the studio's radar.
Paramount Pictures was considering Burt Lancaster, Orson
Welles, George C. Scott, even Edward G. Robinson. When Mr.
Coppola told them he wanted Mr. Brando, studio officials
refused. Mr. Brando was trouble, they said, and box-office
poison.
So Mr. Coppola asked Mr. Brando to submit to a screen test
and, to his astonishment, the actor agreed. Mr. Coppola
described how he took his film crew to Mr. Brando's
Mulholland Drive home and quietly set up one morning. The
actor, Mr. Coppola said, at first ignored them and then sat
down and began to transform himself into Don Corleone. He
put Kleenex in his cheeks, slicked back his hair, affected a
raspy voice.
When Mr. Coppola showed studio executives the astonishing
transformation, they agreed to sign Mr. Brando for the
part - but only at a salary of $250,000, a fraction of what
he had been earning a decade earlier.
The movie was a major critical and box-office success,
acclaimed as a classic almost from the moment it was
released. It also reminded critics and audiences of Mr.
Brando's powerful screen presence. So no one was surprised
when he was nominated for a best actor Oscar, despite a role
that was significantly smaller than that of co-star Al
Pacino.
"Marlon Brando has finally connected with a character and a
film that need not embarrass America's most complex, most
idiosyncratic film actor," Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.
Mr. Brando had frequently expressed disdain for awards in
those years. Would he attend the Oscars? Mr. Brando refused
to say until the last minute, when he told academy officials
he would send an American Indian actress, Sacheen
Littlefeather, in his place.
When Ms. Littlefeather arrived, she told the show's
producer, Howard W. Koch, that Mr. Brando had given her a
15-page statement to read if he won the award. "I'll give
you 45 seconds to make your statement," Mr. Koch said,
according to "Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the
Academy Awards," by Mason Wiley and Damien Bona. "If you go
one second over, I'll have you bodily removed from the
stage. I promise you I'm not afraid to do that."
There were gasps, therefore, when Mr. Brando's name was
announced as the winner. When actor Roger Moore attempted to
hand the Oscar statuette to Ms. Littlefeather, she brushed
it aside and said that Mr. Brando "very regretfully cannot
accept this very generous award" because of the way American
Indians had been treated by Hollywood.
Passionate commitment to social causes was nothing new to
Mr. Brando. As early as 1946, while appearing in a play
about the founding of Israel, he became committed to raising
money for the new state. Later, he was a champion for civil
rights, the Black Panther Party and the plight of Soviet
Jews. But his most vociferous public protests were on behalf
of American Indian rights.
He followed up his "Godfather" triumph with one of his
greatest performances, in Mr. Bertolucci's controversial and
erotic "Last Tango in Paris," an X-rated sensation in its
day. Many of his monologues, particularly one about being
abandoned and humiliated, were drawn from his own childhood
experiences.
In The Times, Mr. Canby wrote: "I use the word courageous
carefully. For Brando, like Bertolucci, had pulled out all
the stops without fear of looking absurd."
Mr. Brando was nominated again for an Oscar, but this time
the academy did not give it to him.
He was no longer eager to suffer the psychic damage that
good acting required, Mr. Brando told friends. " `Last
Tango' required a lot of emotional arm-wrestling," he wrote
in his autobiography. "And when it was finished, I decided
that I wasn't ever again going to destroy myself emotionally
to make a movie."
So, suddenly back on top, Mr. Brando set about cashing in.
He bragged about how he earned so much money for so little
work, most memorably when he was given $4 million for three
weeks work as the father of "Superman," in 1978.
He began to make noticeably quirky character choices, which
some critics saw as thumbing his nose at the audience. In
"The Missouri Breaks," in 1976, he played a frontier bounty
hunter, inexplicably appearing in one scene dressed as a
middle-aged pioneer woman. In "The Formula," he was almost
unrecognizable as a greedy oil executive.
All the while, Mr. Brando continued to recede into his
private world. He reached a kind of oddball apogee in Mr.
Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," playing a renegade colonel in a
surreal version of Vietnam. In the documentary "Hearts of
Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," Mr. Coppola said he was
stunned when Mr. Brando first appeared on the set, grossly
overweight and shaved bald.
Mr. Brando played a small, but entertainingly eccentric role
as an anti-apartheid lawyer in "A Dry White Season" (1989),
then followed it up with a critically acclaimed comic turn
as a quasigangster in "The Freshman," a kind of send-up of
his "Godfather" persona.
In 1990, Mr. Brando found himself back on the tabloid front
pages when his son, Christian, was accused of shooting and
killing Dag Drollet, 26, the son of a prominent Tahitian
banker and politician who had been accused of abusing
Cheyenne Brando, 20, his girlfriend. Suddenly, Mr. Brando's
dysfunctional family became fodder for the gossip pages.
In 1995 People Magazine said that Mr. Brando had at least 11
children - five by his three wives, three by his Guatemalan
housekeeper, Christina Ruiz, and three from other affairs.
Other reports hinted at other children from other affairs.
Mr. Brando refused to talk about it.
"The family kept changing shape," Christian Brando told a
reporter. "I'd sit down at the breakfast table and say, `Who
are you?' "
And Mr. Brando, who had frequently spoken of his own sense
of abandonment as a child, was accused by Cheyenne of doing
the same to her. "I have come to despise my father for the
way he ignored me when I was a child," she said.
Mr. Brando testified on his son's behalf. "I tried to be a
good father," he said, tearfully. "I did the best I could."
Christian Brando pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter
and served nearly five years in state prison.
Five years later, Cheyenne Brando hanged herself in the
bedroom of her mother's home in Tahiti. It was her third
suicide attempt. Family members said she had been in and out
of drug rehabilitation and mental hospitals and had been
severely depressed since Mr. Drollet's killing.
Gradually, Mr. Brando seemed to emerge from the disaster.
In 1995, he had another brief triumph as a lovelorn
psychiatrist in "Don Juan DeMarco," opposite Johnny Depp and
Faye Dunaway.
"Mr. Brando doesn't so much play his role as play along, in
scenes that have been pasted together from suspiciously
short takes," Janet Maslin wrote in The Times. "He never
succeeds in being as subversive as he looked on live
television last year, when he scared the daylights out of a
CNN camera crew and Larry King."
The two interviews with Mr. King were, indeed, odd affairs.
In the first, Mr. Brando wore red suspenders and heavy
makeup, saying he was trying to look like Mr. King. He
propped his bare feet in camera view and was typically
combative and rambling. At the end, he kissed Mr. King on
the lips.
In the second interview, Mr. Brando got into trouble by
complaining that Hollywood was controlled by Jews who showed
too little social conscience. Jewish leaders were outraged.
Mr. Brando apologized and had a three-hour meeting with Los
Angeles rabbis during which he wept and spoke some Yiddish.
Mr. Brando had one final, flaming disaster with "The Island
of Dr. Moreau" in 1996, which ran way over schedule and
budget and spawned reports of terrifying clashes on the set.
The film drew scathing reviews and bombed.
By this point, Mr. Brando had largely fallen from the public
stage. Those who saw him said he was still struggling with a
weight problem. And there were several film projects that
either did not come to fruition or, for one reason or
another, were not released.
"Food has always been my friend," he said. "When I wanted to
feel better or had a crisis in my life, I opened the
icebox."
In April 2001, he was hospitalized for pneumonia just days
before he was to begin shooting a small role in the sequel,
"Scary Movie II." He was reportedly to be paid $2 million
for the brief appearance.
The actor told Mr. King's television audience why he loved
the South Pacific so much and, in the process, explained
something about himself.
"When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes,
and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up
above," he said. "And I am looking into this very deep,
indescribable night, it is something that escapes my
vocabulary to describe. Then I think, God, I have no
importance, whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does,
is not more important than the grains of sand that I am
lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow. So I
really don't think in the long sense."
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:40e5d23b$0$23323$61fe...@news.rcn.com...
>
> I won't be able to tell you whether it's above or below
the
> fold until I get the hard copy. I'm guessing above.
>
Above. First two colums. Two photos. Streetcar and The
Godfather.
Terrymelin
>Godfather.
>
Pretty ridiculous if you ask me. Considering that Tracy, Grant, and Stewart --
all better actors and all bigger stars -- were below the fold and one photo.
Terry Ellsworth
Loki
>>Above. First two colums. Two photos. Streetcar and The
>>Godfather.
>>
>
>Pretty ridiculous if you ask me.
Nobody did.
Loki
Jason Quilliam
"Terrymelin" <terry...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040703113803...@mb-m22.aol.com...
The fold being? Wait, let me guess - does that mean you see the obit on the
front page when the paper is folded in half and right side up?
Curious -
Jason
Hyfler/Rosner
"Jason Quilliam" <jqui...@rogers.com> wrote in message
> The fold being? Wait, let me guess - does that mean you
see the obit on the
> front page when the paper is folded in half and right side
up?
>
> Curious -
Yes. Newspaper speak. It's the way it appears on the
newsstand. Presumably, the sexier the material above the
fold, the more likely someone will pass by and want to scoop
it up.
The Daily News front page was all Brando.
THE DON IS GONE.
Jason Quilliam
Excellent, thanks!