Marlon Brando (1924-2004)

[Monkey]

"Marlon Brando has died in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 80 years old.

Brando, a recluse, was known to be in poor health and earlier this year was seen being pushed in a wheelchair and breathing with the help of an oxygen mask.

He was struck down with pneumonia in 2002.

Regarded by many as the greatest actor of his generation, Marlon Brando was the original angry young man of cinema.

His electrifying performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront were unlike anything Hollywood had seen before.

Two decades on his Oscar-winning role in The Godfather sealed his status as a screen legend.

But Brando’s life was marred by tragedy, and his later years were a tale of sad decline.

He became a recluse, and his rare film appearances were overshadowed by tales of his eccentric behaviour on set.

Days before his death it emerged that he was existing on social security and a pension from the Screen Actors Guild, with major debts.

It was a sad end to the life of a Hollywood icon.

Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3 1924, to a salesman father and amateur actress mother.

The actor remembered his childhood growing up on a farmstead as an unhappy one.

His father, Marlon Sr, was a womaniser and disciplinarian prone to violent rages while his mother, Dodie, whom he adored, was an alcoholic.

“She was beautiful. What a pity she spent most of her time on the floor,� the actor once said of her.

Brando was a wayward teen and was expelled from several academic institutions, including military academy.

Aged 19, he moved to New York with his mother, intent on becoming an actor, and enrolled at Elia Kazan’s Actors’ Studio.

There he studied method acting, the discipline which requires performers to draw on their own experiences and emotions to create a character, and became its most famous exponent.

After a few small parts he landed the lead in a Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, playing Stanley Kowalski.

His performance caused a sensation and set a new benchmark for actors – one critic wrote that Brando displayed “a delicate ferocity unlike any acting I had ever seen�.

In 1951 he appeared in the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire and became a Hollywood star.

The four films which followed – Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), The Wild One (1953) and On The Waterfront (1954) – sealed his reputation as one of the most gifted actors America had ever seen.

On The Waterfront earned Brando an Oscar for his role as ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy, and gave him his most memorable line: “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender�.

Director Elia Kazan said of Brando: “If there is a better performance by a man in the history of American film, I don’t know what it is.�

But Brando followed it up with a string of forgettable films.

Sayonara (1957), The Young Lions (1958) and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) were the only ones to stand out.

While filming Mutiny on the Bounty, in which he played Fletcher Christian, he fell so in love with the Tahitian location that he bought his own island, Tetiaroa.

He set up home there, thousands of miles from the Hollywood he hated.

Brando had become disillusioned with acting – dismissing it as “a bum’s life� – and despised the idea of celebrity.

“If there’s anything unsettling to the stomach, it’s watching actors on television talk about their personal lives,� he said.

His career was revitalised in 1972 with his role as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, for which he won his second Oscar.

The actor did not turn up to the Academy Awards ceremony, instead sending a “Red Indian� called Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award in protest at Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans.

Miss Littlefeather was later revealed to be an actress called Maria Cruz.

Brando also courted controversy in 1972 in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris.

The film was banned for its infamous sex scenes between Brando and actress Maria Schneider, and caused a storm around the world.

From that point on Brando retreated even further from the limelight, restricting his career to supporting roles such as the renegade Colonel Walter E Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

“The only reason I’m in Hollywood is that I don’t have the moral courage to refuse the money,� he admitted, and the money certainly was too good to turn down.

He picked up €3m and a percentage of the profits for a brief 10-minute appearance in Superman in 1978, for which he headed the credits above Superman himself, Christopher Reeve.

Over the last 25 years he appeared in a series of box office flops (Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, The Island of Dr Moreau) but his performances could still generate excitement amongst film critics, such as his 20-minute turn as a lawyer in 1989 apartheid drama A Dry White Season.

His behaviour on set and elsewhere, however, became more eccentric with each passing year.

In 2001 he appeared on stage at a comeback concert for Michael Jackson in New York’s Madison Square Garden and was booed by the crowd for making a rambling speech about child abuse and starvation.

The same year he accepted a part on Robert De Niro movie The Score and tales emerged of the corpulent actor walking around the set naked from the waist down.

Now living in a shabby home in Los Angeles, he refused to speak to callers and instead sent them faxes addressed from his dog, Doctor Tim.

Meanwhile Brando’s private life became increasingly chaotic.

He married three times and had 11 children – two of whom were to be the source of terrible tragedy.

In 1990, his eldest son Christian shot dead his half-sister Cheyenne’s fiance, Dag Drollet.

Christian admitted the killing and served five years in jail – Brando stood by his son and later claimed the hefty legal fees had left him broke.

Heartbroken by her lover’s death, former drug addict Cheyenne committed suicide in Tahiti five years later.

Christian was the son of Brando’s first wife, British starlet Anna Kashfi, whom he married in 1957 and divorced two years later.

His other two marriages were to Mexican actress Movita Castenada, his co-star in Viva Zapata!, and Polynesian actress Tarita Teriipia, whom he met while filming Mutiny on the Bounty.

His youngest three children were by his housekeeper, Maria Ruiz. They split and she launched a case against him for child support.

In his heyday, Brando had affairs with a string of women, including Marilyn Monroe and Shelley Winters.

His heart-throb looks had long since disappeared by the time of his death, but his legacy as one of the all-time movie greats will live on.

“The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them,� he once said, and that was something Brando never did"

what a loss.

[kj]

i just read this on CNN Godfather night tonight methinks.

[Dashingmajor]

I'm thinking of watching Apocalypse now, or On the waterfront.
On the waterfront is truly a remarkable film.
It's a sad day for cinema today.

E

[AlanG]

Originally Posted by Monkey

His career was revitalised in 1972 with his role as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, for which he won his second Oscar.

The actor did not turn up to the Academy Awards ceremony, instead sending a “Red Indian� called Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award in protest at Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans.

Miss Littlefeather was later revealed to be an actress called Maria Cruz.

although an actress the woman was a Native American.

Another eulogy from CounterPunch

From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather
A Eulogy for Our Marlon Brando
By DAVE ZIRIN

Marlon Brando's death at the age of 80 will begin a battle over how the "greatest actor of all time" will be remembered. Some will focus on his latter day isolation, his bizarre behavior, and the many personal tragedies that befell his family.

Others will focus exclusively on his iconic status, and when it comes to Brando performances, icons abound. There was the 1950s motorcycle rebel from "The Wild One" (1954), or the brutal Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) or Terry "I Coulda Been a Contender" Malloy in "On the Waterfront" (1954). or his performance as Vito Corleone in "The Godfather."

Then there is Brando's influence on acting itself. In a Hollywood built around "movie stars" Brando was at the vanguard of a new generation of performers in the aftermath of World War II schooled in Stanislavsky's "Method" acting style. Taught by Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio in New York, The Method was a rejection of the Spencer Tracy approach to drama of "Just memorize your lines and don't bump into the furniture." Emotional honesty and "becoming" your character were the hallmarks of this style It was an attempt to use art to break out of what was seen as a stultifying and frustration gray haze of early 1950s America. Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Laurence Fishburne, Sean Penn, and countless others count Brando as their primary influence.

But the Brando I want to remember, especially now, is the actor who pulled back in the 1960s to focus on supporting the Civil Rights Movement and the broader struggles against war and oppression. In 1959, he was a founding member of the Hollywood chapter of SANE, an anti-nuclear arms group formed alongside African-American performers Harry Belafonte and Ossie Davis.

In 1963, Brando marched arm in arm with James Baldwin at the March on Washington. He, along with Paul Newman, went down South with the freedom riders to desegregate inter-State bus lines. In defiance of state law, Native Americans protested the denial of treaty rights by fishing the Puyallup River on March 2, 1964. Inspired by the civil rights movement sit-ins, Brando, Episcopal clergyman John Yaryan from San Francisco, and Puyallup tribal leader Bob Satiacum caught salmon in the Puyallup without state permits. The action was called a fish-in and resulted in Brando's arrest.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Brando announced that he was bowing out of the lead role of a major film and would now devote himself to the civil rights movement. Brando said "If the vacuum formed by Dr. King's death isn't filled with concern and understanding and a measure of love, then I think we all are really going to be lost...."

He gave money and spoke out in defense of the Black Panthers and counted Bobby Seale as a close friend and attended the memorial for slain prison leader George Jackson. Southern theater chains boycotted his films, and Hollywood created what became known as the 'Brando Black List' that shut him out of many big time roles.

After making a comeback in Godfather, Brando won his second Oscar. Instead of accepted what he called "a door prize," he sent up Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse befuddled presenter Roger Moore and issue a scathing speech about the Federal Government's treatment of Native Americans.

Even in the past several years, he has lent his name and bank account to those fighting the US war and occupation in Iraq.

So how do we remember Brando? He was a celebrity, an artist, an activist, and at the end an isolated and destroyed old man.

It is tragic that we live in a world where most people's talents never get to see the light of day. It is equally tragic that those like Brando who actually get the opportunity to spread their creative wings, can be consumed and yanked apart in process. Yet whether Brando was on the top of Hollywood or alone and embittered, he never forgot what side he was on.