Marlon Brando; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Greatest screen actor of his generation whose later roles
were unworthy of his talent
03 July 2004
Marlon Brando was the greatest screen actor of his
generation. He was also the most versatile of actors, his
roles including Mark Antony and Sky Masterson, Stanley
Kowalski and Don Vito Corleone, Zapata and Sakini, Fletcher
Christian and Napoleon Bonaparte: not a feat easily
attempted by Laurence Olivier, say, or even Robert de Niro.
Brando's finest performance was as the unintelligent,
tormented stevedore Terry Molloy in On the Waterfront
(1954), directed by Elia Kazan. For this moving study of
filial betrayal he became the youngest actor ever to win the
Best Actor Academy Award (overtaken only by Richard Dreyfuss
in 1977 and, last year, by Adrien Brody). But, despite a
flurry of revival some 20 years later, Brando confirmed
Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "there are no second acts in
American lives", and like other prodigies - John Barrymore,
Orson Welles, Elvis Presley - led a strange, singular,
tragic existence, taking roles unworthy of his talent, his
body bloated with over-indulgence, his personal life in
tatters and his soul barely at rest.
Marlon Brando (his real name; friends called him "Bud" from
childhood) grew up acting. Born in 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska,
the son of a philandering father and an alcoholic mother, he
was sent to Shattuck Military Academy at the age of 16 to
learn discipline. There he appeared in the school drama
group production of A Message From Khufu - his début - and
in the vacation he appeared with his drama-coach mother in
local repertory.
At the suggestion of his actress sister Jocelyn Brando, he
enrolled at Erwin Piscator's dramatic workshop of the New
School for Social Research in New York and studied the
Constantine Stanislavsky "Method" under Stella Adler. He was
to be the most famous perpetuator of this particular style
of naturalistic acting, often unfairly pilloried or
caricatured for his notorious "mumbling" and "scratching",
but the reality was that Brando was continually searching
for a way to find the truth in a role: and more often than
not he found it, guided by his natural talent and instinct -
that talent that was to burst forth in a stage role first
turned down by both Robert Mitchum and John Garfield, the
brutish and inarticulate rapist Stanley Kowalski in
Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
Stripped to a T-shirt, Brando electrified Broadway.
He was a revelation. Nothing in his earlier stage work,
whether Marchbanks to Katherine Cornell's Candida in Shaw's
eponymous play or his brief fling with Tallulah Bankhead in
The Eagle Has Two Heads (both 1946), had prepared a post-war
audience for the power and the sheer sex appeal of his
Stanley Kowalski. Brando redefined stage acting with
Streetcar, and he was to do so again on screen.
Marlon Brando's movie début was not in Streetcar but as a
paraplegic war victim in the director Fred Zinnemann's
sensitively handled The Men (1950), and it was to be the
beginning of Brando's conspicuous social commitment, whereby
he was able to use his celebrity to draw attention to causes
such as civil rights in the United States or apartheid in
South Africa. He drew excellent reviews for his role, but
The Men was not a film likely to evoke mass appeal.
The bowdlerised screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire
arrived in 1951, directed, as was the play, by Elia Kazan, a
director with whom Brando established a particular rapport,
and with whom he would achieve his greatest successes. He
lost out at the Oscars to Humphrey Bogart in The African
Queen, but A Streetcar Named Desire made Brando world-famous
and characteristically he rebelled at such fame by flaunting
his new-found stardom: he controversially wore jeans and a
T-shirt in public, insulted Hollywood's venerable columnists
and rode a mean motorcycle, and in so doing influenced
generations of young actors. He became the first screen
rebel, and it was an image that he sustained all his life.
A Streetcar Named Desire proved that the camera, alongside
the public, loved Marlon Brando: that stage presence seemed
doubly electric on the screen; the angelic good looks seemed
made for celluloid, the Method throwaway technique
revolutionary in an era of well-groomed movie leading men.
Brando was in a position now to pick and choose his future
roles, and he established a remarkable career pattern - by
not signing a long-term studio contract he could take risks
with every film.
Next, in 1952, again for Kazan, came Viva Zapata! from a
John Steinbeck screenplay, a daring left-wing movie directed
by a former Communist, and then an impressive Mark Antony
for MGM and the director Joseph L. Mankiewicz in an all-star
Julius Caesar (1953), a thoughtful and articulate
performance that confounded contemporary reviewers, who
thought Marlon Brando and Stanley Kowalski were one and the
same.
The rebel Brando persona was cast for ever in The Wild One
(1954), a biker movie initially banned in Britain, in which
the leather-clad and frankly over-age Brando uttered the
immortal reply to Mary Murphy's question "What're you
rebelling against, Johnny?" The answer: "Whaddya got?"
Today On the Waterfront may seem unfashionable: an apologia
for informing, a hysterical melodrama involving thugs and
priests. But On the Waterfront was never meant to be watched
in comfort on the television screen. In the cinema it
remains a powerful, mesmerising work, containing
unequivocally the finest performance by any actor in the
history of American cinema: Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy.
"I could have had class. I could have been somebody, instead
of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it. It was you,
Charlie . . ." The "contender" dialogue, created by Marlon
Brando from a brilliant series of improvisations, was in a
scene shared by his fellow Method actor Rod Steiger.
A series of major screen roles followed: walking out on The
Egyptian (he didn't like the script) in 1954, he repaid Fox
by portraying Napoleon instead in Désirée (1954). He was
superb singing (with his own limited voice) in Guys and
Dolls (1955), again directed by Mankiewicz, and was
excellent in two forays into post-war Japan in The Teahouse
of the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara (1957), and
outstanding as the Nazi Christian Diestl in The Young Lions
(1958) and in a part based upon the young Elvis Presley in
Tennessee Williams's The Fugitive Kind (1961).
He took over the directorial reins from Stanley Kubrick for
One-Eyed Jacks (1961), and, chastened, never directed again.
And then abruptly this first great surge of his career
dashed on the rocks of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), the MGM
epic that disgorged directors, and ran up a dangerously high
budget, allegedly all because of Marlon Brando.
Brando's performance as the mutineers' leader Fletcher
Christian was underrated at the time, but his behaviour on
set had made him almost unemployable and he spent the next
decade aimlessly in average films, ranging from the
ambitious (Arthur Penn's The Chase, 1966; John Huston's
Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967; Gillo Pontecorvo's
Queimada!, 1967) to the wretched (Christian Marquand's
Candy, 1968; Michael Winner's The Nightcomers, 1971). A bout
with Charles Chaplin in A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) was
disastrous for both parties.
But Marlon Brando's career and box-office appeal were
revived by two films in 1972, two adult movies that he
managed to turn into personal artistic statements. The
second, Last Tango in Paris, was semi-improvised,
semi-autobiographical, and deeply controversial: it achieved
both art-house and spillover success. But The Godfather was
a roaring popular hit that brought Brando his second Oscar
as the fictional Mafia don Vito Corleone. Too young in
actuality for the role, Brando achieved a marvellous
quasi-realism by stuffing Kleenex in his cheeks and speaking
in a growl. Characteristically, he sent a small-part actress
posing as a Red Indian to reject his Academy Award, drawing
attention to the plight of Native Americans.
The twin glories of becoming a bankable star and a cultural
icon were not sustained. The immediate result of the Oscar
was a huge increase in Brando's salary demands, and he
earned $1m and 10 per cent of the gross for only five weeks'
work on the unpopular western The Missouri Breaks (1976). As
Superman's father, Jor-El, he brought a fine, if spurious,
dignity to the 1978 comic-book epic, infamously earning
$3.7m for 12 days' work, his financial demands scuppering
his appearance in the sequel. Reunited with the Godfather
director Francis Ford Coppola, he provided a fittingly
neurotic coda to Apocalypse Now (1979), as Kurtz in a
Vietnam version of Conrad, reissued with more Brando footage
in 2001 as Apocalypse Now Redux, and all the better for it.
Additionally, in 1979, Brando made a television appearance
in the mini- series sequel to Roots called Roots: the next
generations, in a 10-minute section in which he played the
part of the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln
Rockwell. He achieved viewing figures of 66 per cent of the
total audience - 130 million viewers - and won a supporting
Emmy.
Films took a back seat to his private life. He was ever
attracted to exotic women and Mutiny on the Bounty had given
him an interest in exotic places. He bought an island, and
after divorcing the actress Anna Kashfi he married first
Movita, whom he had first met as Maria Castaneda in Viva
Zapata!, and then, at least in a local ceremony, Tarita
(Tarita Tariipaia), his co-star in Mutiny on the Bounty.
His children from this last marriage caused him much grief:
his daughter's lover was shot dead by his own son, and the
daughter later committed suicide. The attendant publicity
drew Marlon Brando back into the limelight, and he cut an
ungainly figure: overweight, and clearly out of touch with
reality.
Maybe reality never concerned him - his performances aspired
to another dimension, his intuition working on a level far
above that of any other performing artist, his
self-deprecating, quirky sense of humour allowing him to
distance himself from the mundane. A few bizarre film
appearances dotted his last years. An Oscar-nominated
co-starring role in A Dry White Season (1989); reviving Don
Corleone in spirit in the misbegotten but amiable The
Freshman (also 1989); a grotesque Torquemada, acting in a
vacuum in the abominable Christopher Columbus: the discovery
(1992); and then suddenly, and surprisingly, the lead as a
psychiatrist in a sweet 1995 vehicle for Johnny Depp, Don
Juan de Marco.
He established a good rapport with Depp, but of their two
later ventures Divine Rapture (1996) ran out of money and
ceased shooting, never to resume, and Depp's directorial
début, the deeply disturbing The Brave (1997), was
considered unshowable. Over The Island of Dr Moreau (1996)
and Free Money (1998), it is best to draw a veil.
After the appearance of a slew of overwritten, gossipy
alleged biograpies, Brando himself decided to tell the whole
truth in a 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me.
Eagerly awaited, it disclosed little, and was swiftly
remaindered.
But the book's photographic illustrations tell a different
story: they show a handsome, dynamic performer, an actor
with the world at his feet, a movie star who changed the way
actors thought about acting, despite the fact that he
himself seemed to have nurtured a contempt for his
profession, squandering that immense natural talent from
choice, ever-reliant on cue cards instead of memory,
invariably choosing a role for its fee rather than its
worth. His last film was The Score (2001), playing a
mastermind very much in the camp manner of Sydney
Greenstreet. He was third-billed to two successive
generations represented by Robert De Niro and Edward Norton,
but you could not take your eyes off him: resplendent in
bulk, magnificent in talent.
To find his own personal truth Brando retreated to his
Tahitian island, or behind the gates of a Beverly Hills
mansion, but for everybody else the real truth that was
Marlon Brando existed in a quite extraordinary body of film
work that will endure as long as there is cinema: the
finest-ever English-language screen actor, bar none.
Tony Sloman
Marlon Brando, actor: born Omaha, Nebraska 3 April 1924;
married 1957 Anna Kashfi (one son; marriage dissolved 1959),
1960 Movita Castaneda (one son, one daughter; marriage
dissolved 1968), (one son, one daughter, and one daughter
deceased, by Tarita Teriipaia, one daughter by Christina
Ruiz, one adopted daughter); died Los Angeles 1 July 2004.