Marlon Brando, whose brooding, tongue-tied characters in The Wild One, On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire uttered some of the most famous lines in movie history, has died at the age of 80.
The two-time Oscar winner died in a Los Angeles hospital late on Thursday, United States media reported on Friday.
Brando dominated the screen with his powerful build, sensual lips and broken nose, even as he underplayed most roles, preferring to let his silence hint at inner struggles and hidden strength. He was at his best playing tongue-tied men, excelling at the moment when his character struggled to express himself and ended up speaking eloquently.
”He had what you might call the perfect combination. He had this wonderful talent, he had sexual appeal … and he refused to compromise,” actor Rod Steiger once said of Brando. ”He became the leader of a kind of truth and realism in acting that would never have happened without him.”
Brandon’s stardom began with the sexy, loutish Stanley Kowalski’s anguished cry, ”Stella! Stella!” in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).
This was followed by his role as Johnny in The Wild One (1954). When asked what he was rebelling against, he replied: ”Whattya got?” And as the boxer in On the Waterfront (1954), he memorably declared to his brother: ”I coulda been a contender!”
Later, after his famous broad shoulders and noble face softened, he still had one of the most memorable movie lines in 1979’s Apocalypse Now: ”The horror. The horror.”
On the screen as well as in his personal life, Brando played the outsider.
He accepted his first Academy Award for On the Waterfront. But his support of Native American causes and protests over their treatment compelled him to send Sacheem Littlefeather, who later turned out not to be a Native American, to refuse his Oscar for the 1972 film The Godfather.
Mutiny on the Bounty brought Brando to Tahiti, where he began a long-term affair with Tarita Teriipia, who bore him a son, Simon Tehotu, and two daughters, Cheyenne and Rebecca. Beginning in 1966, he lived mostly on his private atoll near Tahiti.
He was married twice, to actresses Anna Kashfi and Movita Castenada, and had a 12-year on-and-off relationship with actress Rita Moreno.
His later years were marred by the unhappiness of his troubled children. His oldest child, Christian, Kashfi’s son, killed Cheyenne Brando’s abusive fiancé in 1990. Christian served five years in prison and Cheyenne committed suicide in April 1995 after a long struggle with schizophrenia and depression.
Marlon Brando was born on April 3 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, to alcoholic parents. His father was a salesman, while his mother acted in community theatres in the midwestern state.
The family moved to Libertyville, Illinois, where Brando quickly became an athletic star and a disciplinary problem. When he was 15, his father sent him to the Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, but he was expelled just weeks before graduation.
Brando spent the next few years deciding what to do with his life. He considered the Protestant ministry, but his parents talked him out of it. The army rejected him because of a bad knee.
With his father’s financial help, Brando moved to New York, where his sisters Frances and Jocelyn were studying acting. He entered the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research and, in 1944, made his first appearance on Broadway.
That same year, he began studying with Stella Adler, who taught him ”method” acting, characterised by emotional expressiveness. She described him as ”the most keenly aware, the most empathetical human being alive”.
Brando’s big break came in 1947, in the Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando played the inarticulate Stanley Kowalski as overtly sexual and almost animalistic but still sympathetic.
He originally turned down movie roles, saying in 1948, ”they’ve never made an honest picture in their lives and they probably never will”.
But he won raves for The Men (1950), a semi-documentary about paralyzed soldiers returning from World War II. In 1951, he did a film version of Streetcar, winning an Oscar nomination.
In 1954, Brando played in the pulp fiction movie The Wild One. Film critic Molly Haskell of the Village Voice called Brando’s Johnny, the all-purpose rebel, ”his most mythic performance”.
Brando was equally inarticulate and affecting in On the Waterfront and was named best actor in 1954 for the role of a boxer who, if it had not been for his loyalty to his brother, would have had a shot at a title fight. Instead, he said, ”I got a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”
He won best-actor Oscars for On the Waterfront and for his role as the mafia boss Don Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather. He followed this with Last Tango in Paris (1972), a film about an American expatriate who embarks on an anonymous affair to escape the pain of his wife’s suicide. Despite the undeniable artistry of the movie, its explicit sex led the US film industry to create a voluntary ratings system.
In his later years, he lost his signature looks, bloated by his huge appetite for food and better known for his reclusive lifestyle atop the hills of Los Angeles and his legendary liaisons with women.
Brando told an interviewer in the 1990s that he had withdrawn under the stress of being constantly in the public eye.
”I’ve had so much misery in my life, being famous and wealthy,” he said.
He had at least 11 children with three ex-wives and various other women, including his housekeeper.
Bertolucci: Brando has become ‘immortal’
Meanwhile, Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, paid tribute to the screen legend on Friday by saying he has now ”become immortal”.
”With tears in my eyes, I think that in dying Marlon has become immortal,” Bertolucci said in a statement sent to Italy’s Ansa news agency.
The director said that all those who had worked with Brando in Last Tango in Paris, a tale of sex, discovery and disillusionment in Paris of 1968, had been ”totally hypnotised by his presence”.
”None of us had ever found ourselves before such a great living legend,” he said.
The Italian said Brando ”had learnt better than his peers how to feel like another person, to become a Mexican revolutionary, a Hell’s Angel, a New York docker, a tree or a river. The cinema generally requires an actor to enter the skin of another. Me, on the other hand, I asked him in the film for his life as a man and an actor.”
After making the movie, Bertolucci said Brando ”told me ‘I will never do another film like that. I don’t like acting, but that was the worst. I felt violated from start to finish, my life, my deepest feelings, and even my children, you tore everything from me’,” Bertolucci quoted Brando as saying.
Bertolucci recalled how Brando never spoke to him from 12 years after that, made him suffer and doubt himself and his work.
Then one day, ”I tried to get in touch and he kept me on the phone for two hours, and after that we began talking again like before,” Bertolucci said. — Sapa-AFP