Marlon Brando: The Icon

Marlon Brando, Jr., who was infamous for his practical jokes and messing with people’s heads, would tell any interviewer who would listen that he couldn't care less about acting. Was the notorious joker telling everyone a joke?

If he was telling everyone the truth, then the irony and tragedy is that an actor who did not care about acting managed to change the landscape of acting forever. Take a second to truly think about this. Generations of fanatical followers who perceive the craft as some kind of divine calling were inspired by an actor who was untouched by the wonder of acting.

Born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, the third child of a chemical manufacturer and an actress. Later, they moved to Illinois. His childhood was a troubled one. Both parents were alcoholics. His mother, whom he did not find out was an actress till his early adulthood, frequently vanished only to be found drunk in a bar somewhere. The young Marlon had to rescue his mother far too many times by putting himself forward for his father's beatings and berating of the family. His father beat and belittled his mother and Marlon. Although he was extremely intelligent, his home trauma led to school trouble and defiance. He defied teachers, set fires, defaced buildings, and was ultimately expelled from high school after riding his motorcycle through the halls of his school.

“I was his namesake, but nothing I did ever pleased or even interested him. He enjoyed telling me I couldn't do anything right. He had a habit of telling me I would never amount to anything.”

MARLON BRANDO

He developed a gift for imitation throughout his childhood difficulties, expertly observing and mimicking the mannerisms of his friends, teachers and even animals. When he was sent off to Shattuck Military academy, where his father attended, his older sisters were in New York pursuing acting and the arts. The academy helped Marlon channel his brooding anger and helped change his mimicking skills to stage acting in theatre classes. Once he entered the Military Academy, his defiant ways did not stop; after a brief expulsion for disobeying the orders of a visiting army colonel, he chose to drop out of school for good. He wanted to enlist in the army, but he failed the physical test. Lost in the world, he finally decided to follow in the steps of his older sisters and go to New York and to give acting a shot, where he began studying at the American Theatre Wing Professional School.

“If I have a scene to play and I have to be angry, I can remember my father hitting me.”

MARLON BRANDO

Soon after arriving in New York, Brando’s raw acting ability caught the eye of the New York theatre world. Among his admirers was the great Stella Adler, who was a teacher at the Dramatic Workshop. Adler would change Brando’s life forever. She took him in and became the mother he never had. He met the first true love of his life in her daughter, Ellen Adler, and, maybe most importantly, she introduced Brando to the Stanislavski approach to acting and theatrical theory. The Stanislavski method urges actors to take from their personal experiences and memories to generate real emotions and to connect with the characters. The actors' aim of this method is to delve into their characters' minds and emulate their thinking and behaviour. The goal is to create a powerful personality that the audience can not distinguish between the actor and the character. The realism that is brought from this method brings the feeling of purification for both the actors and the audience and is an important component of both film and stage. The Stanislavski method is otherwise known as Method acting. The art of Method acting is a dying art form in the modern-day. Some actors will use the Stanislavski method to offer an air of authenticity, credibility, and significance, regardless of its quality, to a performance.

“When he acted it gave you the chills. It was like suddenly you woke up and there’s your idiot child playing Mozart”

MAE COOPER, a classmate at the Dramatic Workshop

He first appeared on Broadway in I Remember Mama in 1944, the same year he made his stage debut in a workshop production of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hannele where he played Jesus Christ. After roles in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Cafe, George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, and Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born, all in 1946, Brando was voted "Broadway’s most promising actor" by New York critics. In 1947, he would team up with another influential person in his creative journey from the Dramatic Workshop, Elia Kazan. Brando’s stardom hit new heights in the theatre world with his extraordinarily ferocious, emotionally driven performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Kazan.

Brando made his film debut in The Men (1950), an intense, authentic film about World War II veterans who came home disabled. Keeping up with his method acting ways, he prepared for the role by spending a month in a hospital ward for the paraplegic. His second film would once again play the role of Stanley Kowalski, but this time he would be creating the same magic from the play for a film after Kazan adapted the play for the big screen. Brando would receive his first Academy Award nomination for his performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). He would receive consecutive nominations for the next two years for his performances in Viva Zapata! (1952) and Julius Caesar (1953). The star of Brando was shining bright in Hollywood and he was only going to get bigger after his performance in the low-budget drama where he portrayed the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1953). The film would create an iconic look for Brando that would outlive him. It also had one of Brando’s most quotable lines; when asked what it is, he is rebelling against, his character responds, "Whaddya got?".

“He is the marker. There’s ‘before Brando’ and ‘after Brando.’ And I think it’s time, especially for younger people, to go back and understand that and see those pictures in the order in which they were made. Mainly because, I think, now they’re too hip to feel these emotions that were exploding on the screen with him. It’s about being human.”

MARTIN SCORSESE

Although Brando had been nominated for three Academy Awards in three years, he had yet to win one, but that was all going to change on the fourth try when he teamed up with Kazan for the fourth time for On The Waterfront (1954). Brando plays Terry Malloy, an intelligent but uneducated former prize-fighter who has only ever known the dangerous and grimy environment he grew up in. His world is that of gruesome gangsters, loan sharks, and villains. His two mottos: "Don’t say nothin’; you’ll live longer." and "Do it to him before he does it to you".

The most famous scene in the film, between Terry and his brother Charley (Rod Steiger), gets at the true heart and soul of Terry. When Charley, his brother, pulls a gun on him to try to convince Terry to do something against his moral fibre, Terry does not respond with violence or even animosity, but in a tone of tender reproach and sorrow. He calmly pushes the gun aside and replies, "Oh, Charley…" suggesting nothing more than love and regret at the loss of that brotherly love. Terry, at that moment, finally reveals his pain in all his wasted potential and where his life has led him, "I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it". This scene has been parodied countless times, but there has never been any competition for this scene. Nothing will ever come close to the perfection of this scene. Brando makes the audience feel the pain that Terry is relieving here and, in some ways, brings the audience to judge their wasted potential.

Another scene from the film that will be shown to acting students across the world after 50 years is the acclaimed "white glove" scene. The scene began as an improvisation, which makes it even more impressive and remarkable. After Eva Marie Saint, the love interest in the film who plays Edie Doyle drops her white glove not knowing if she will have to pick it up or if she will just leave it, but without missing a beat, Brando throws the entire rhythm of the scene away once he unconsciously picks up the glove and starts fidgeting with it. He created a second dynamic by doing this. The first dynamic between them was intimate, delicate conversation, and the second gives meaning to their physical interaction. Once Terry has the glove in his hand, Edie is stuck. She is unsure of what she should do. Should she try to reach and grab the glove away from Terry, or respectfully await its return? She cycles through alternative approaches unconsciously and while holding a personal conversation. With each attempt to recover her white glove and Terry’s playful teasing, the chemistry between the two can barely fit on the screen.

Brando bursts through decades of Hollywood characteristics and truly encapsulated the character; the audience looks at Terry and does not see the great actor on the screen, but the simple, uneducated, working-class "bum," a New Jersey dock worker who playfully picks up a woman's white glove on the street and puts it on, who mutters and stumbles on his words, and whose facial expressions, movements, and tone convey so much more than any words could. In my humble opinion, this is the greatest performance in film history.

For the rest of the ‘50s, Brando’s film roles varied from playing Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée (1954) to singing and dancing in Guys and Dolls (1955) as Sky Masterson, to portraying a Nazi soldier in The Young Lions (1958). From 1955 to 1958, Brando was voted one of the top 10 box-office draws in America. However, sadly, the downfall of Brando will only be a few years later. In the 1960s, he was a part of more films and personal failures than success. The tipping point in Brando’s personal and professional life happened when MGM studios decided to remake Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) in 1962. Brando would portray the role made famous by Clark Gable in the original, Fletcher Christian. The film would fail to recoup even half of the film's 19 million dollar budget. Brando's immoderate self-indulgence hit new heights during the filming of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). His constant on-set tantrums and attempts to change the script were heavily criticized at the time by the cast, crew and studio. In his contract for the film, it was stated he would earn $5,000 for every day the film was over its original schedule. Once the film was all wrapped and finished, Brando had made $1.25 million from it.

By the early '70s, Brando’s career had stalled, and he was seen as washed up by Hollywood. However, a young daring director, Francis Ford Coppola, sought out Brando for his new film as he thought he was perfect for the role of Vito Corleone in The Godfather. After Brando gave in to the demands and rules set by Paramount studio, he had the role of Don Vito Corleone in Coppola’s gangster epic. It would reignite his career, winning him his second Academy Award for Best Actor 18 years after winning his first. The biggest difference between this director and the rest was the fact Brando and Coppola got along with each other and Coppola would listen and hear his ideas. It was Brando’s best collaboration since Kazan years earlier. A year later, Brando would get another Academy Award nomination for his role in the incredibly successful but controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972), but after these critically acclaimed performances and films, he went back to doing movies for the sole purposes of making big money, like his role in Superman (1978).

“The only reason I’m in Hollywood is that I don’t have the moral courage to refuse the money”

MARLON BRANDO

The partnership of Coppola and Brando had created one of the greatest characters and films in cinema history, but when the pair joined up together again seven years later for Apocalypse Now (1979), Brando was half the man he used to be or twice the man he used to be. Brando turned up to set so overweight that he demanded that Coppola shoot around his excess baggage, but Coppola had planned to use Brando’s body to show that his character, the deranged Colonel Kurtz, was "a man-eating all the time and overindulging". In the final film for its original release, Apocalypse Now run time was 2 hours 33 minutes and Brando does not appear until the last 30 minutes of the film. Once he does appear, he is hardly visible. Shot in the dark, misty close-ups, in dim long shots. Brando could have done a voiceover performance and the audience would have been none the wiser. This shows Brando got his own way. From then on, most of his films were pretty mediocre. Brando did manage to get one more Academy Award nomination for an eye-catching supporting role in the otherwise generic A Dry White Season (1989). No matter the film he was in, there was something. There was never a boring performance, there was also just the right amount of something.

Brando’s private life was more interesting and captivating than any movie he was a part of. It was a well-known fact that he loved his food, women and allegedly men a little too much. Throughout his career, his best performances needed him to be constrained and display fury and anguish. Something he may have learnt from his parents during a tough childhood.

“If my father were alive today, I don't know what I would do. After he died, I used to think, ‘God, just give him to me alive for eight seconds because I want to break his jaw”

MARLON BRANDO

Although Brando avoided speaking about his marriages and love affairs, it is on record that he was married three times to three ex-actresses. He had 11 children that we know of. Five of the children were with his three wives, three were with his Guatemalan housekeeper, and the other three of Brando’s children came from affairs. The notorious womanizer left many broken hearts in his past, including actress Rita Moreno, who attempted suicide during their turbulent relationship.

“The family kept changing shape. I’d sit down at the breakfast table and say, who are you?”

CHEYENNE BRANDO

On 16 May 1990, a man was shot in the head as he sat slumped in Brando's den watching television. Brando heard the shot and rushed towards the scene, giving mouth to mouth in an urgent effort to save the young man's life. It was too late. The man who laid in Brando’s arms dead was 26-year-old Dag Drollet, a scion of a prominent Tahitian family and boyfriend of Cheyenne Brando, Marlon’s daughter, who was eight months pregnant at the time with Drollet's child. Cheyenne was the child of Tahitian actress Tarita Teriipaia, who met Brando when filming Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) where they fell in love and eventually married, becoming Brando’s third marriage. Marlon knew who the killer of his unborn grandchild's father was. It was his cherished son, Christian.

In 1991, Christian pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to serve 10 years for the crime. Christian claimed that Drollet was physically abusive to his pregnant sister, Cheyenne. Christian stated that he accidentally shot Drollet in the face during a struggle between the two of them.

“I tried to be a good father. I did the best I could”

MARLON BRANDO, on the witness stand during the trial

Cheyenne spent much of her life in and out of drug rehabilitation centres and mental institutions. She chose to live with her mother, Tahiti, rather than spend any more time with her father.

“I have come to despise my father for the way he ignored me as a child”

CHEYENNE BRANDO

After the events of May 16, 1990, Cheyenne became even more isolated and depressed. She had her child taken away from her by a judge who ruled she was too depressed to raise a child on her own. The judge gave custody of her son to her mother, Tarita. On Easter Sunday in 1995, Cheyenne took leave from a mental hospital to visit her mother and son at her mother's house. She would kill herself while on leave at her mother’s home. The media would later give Brando’s Beverly Hills mansion a cruel nickname, "the House of Pain".

Marlon Brando, Jr. died of pulmonary fibrosis in a Los Angeles hospital in 2004 at the age of 80. But it would be a mistake to judge Brando from his appearance in his final years and to ignore his significance in cinema history because of his later, less inconsequential acting jobs.

“To me, Marlon Brando was the greatest ever. That’s a truth I hold to be self-evident. But it’s like what Bum Phillips said once: If he isn’t in a class by himself, it sure takes a very short time to call the roll.”

JACK NICHOLSON

Through most of his career, he was trapped in a gimmick, when his mere presence was itself one of the most charismatic and original ever filmed. Brando was a living work of art himself, and most of his best-framed performances are not gilded lilies, but gilded paintings. Overpainted, over varnished, overdecorated by so many directors who did not truly understand the meaning of his artform. His range of roles demonstrates his ability to investigate the unique characteristics of the human psyche. Ironically, only a handful of his films came close to the true depths of Marlon Brando, because the technical and theatrical side of him was the one he was celebrated and rewarded for.