Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando: The Chicken That Knew Nothing About Bombs

Stella Adler told her class to be chickens about to be hit by a nuclear blast. The room erupted into shrieking panic. One student settled quietly and pretended to lay an egg. Asked to explain himself, he said: "I'm a chicken — what do I know about bombs?" That is Marlon Brando's revolution in a single anecdote: not more emotion, but the correct amount, arrived at by thinking about what the character could plausibly know.

Omaha

He was born on 3 April 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, to a travelling salesman and a stage actress who was frequently away. The neglect was real enough that the departure of the family housekeeper, to whom he was attached, left him with lifelong abandonment issues. One of his two elder sisters, Jocelyn, also became an actress. Despite a career built on Italian-American roles, his ancestry was German, Dutch, English and Irish; a patrilineal ancestor emigrated from the Palatinate in the early 1700s.

Expelled, Twice

His parents separated in 1936 and reconciled in 1938. At Libertyville High School in Illinois he excelled at sports and drama and failed nearly everything else; he was expelled in 1941. His father sent him to Shattuck Military Academy, where he acted brilliantly and was placed on probation for insubordination in 1943. Caught sneaking off campus, he was voted out by the faculty — though the students petitioned against it — and left before the expulsion took effect. He tried to enlist and was rejected: a football injury had left him with a chronic knee condition.

Adler

He went to New York, slept on friends' couches, and enrolled at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School under Erwin Piscator. His real teacher was Stella Adler, who taught him the Stanislavski system and its insistence on the external as well as the internal life of a character.

The correction matters, because Brando spent decades being called a method actor and rejecting the label with venom. Of Lee Strasberg he said: "He never taught me anything. He would have claimed credit for the sun and the moon if he believed he could get away with it." He credited Adler, and later Elia Kazan.

Kowalski

He debuted on Broadway in *I Remember Mama* (1944) and won Theatre World awards for *Candida* and *Truckline Cafe* in 1946. Then, in 1947, Kazan directed him as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's *A Streetcar Named Desire*, and American acting changed.

He built Kowalski by watching the boxer Rocky Graziano train at a gym. When Graziano came to see the play, his reaction was reportedly: "The curtain went up and on the stage is that son of a bitch from the gym, and he's playing me." Variety, assessing the career after his death, described the performance as combining "brutish sexuality with vulnerability and unexpected humor" and credited it with striking a blow against the Production Code.

The Contender

His first film was *The Men* (1950), as an embittered paraplegic veteran; he spent a month in a hospital bed to prepare, and the New York Times found the performance "so vividly real, dynamic and sensitive that his illusion is complete." The 1951 film of *Streetcar* brought his first Oscar nomination. *Julius Caesar* (1953) so impressed John Gielgud that he offered Brando a full season at the Hammersmith Theatre. Brando declined.

*The Wild One* (1953) put him on his own Triumph motorcycle and made him an accidental emblem of teenage rebellion, to his stated bafflement. He recognised one line as autobiography: "There's a line in the picture where he snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life."

*On the Waterfront* (1954) won him the Academy Award. In the famous taxi scene he overrode the script, gently pushing away his brother's gun instead of playing fear, on the grounds that Terry Malloy would never believe his brother would shoot him. Kazan admired the instinct and the contrast it produced between "the tough-guy front and the extreme delicacy and gentle cast of his behavior." Roger Ebert's summary: "Brando and Kazan changed acting in American films forever."

The Fuck You Years

Then he threw it away, and named the period himself. After the troubled western *One-Eyed Jacks* (1961), which he directed, his reputation for difficulty scared off filmmakers, and a five-picture Universal deal signed that year tied him to material beneath him. *Bedtime Story*, *The Appaloosa*, *A Countess from Hong Kong* — directed, unhappily for both men, by Charlie Chaplin, whose authoritarian manner appalled him — and *The Night of the Following Day* all failed. *Candy* (1968) was the floor. The Washington Post wrote that "Brando's self-indulgence over a dozen years is costing him and his public his talents." His own explanation was blunt: he took the parts for money, or because friends asked.

The Godfather, and the Refusal

By 1972 he was considered unbankable. Paramount fought his casting as Vito Corleone and imposed three conditions: below-market pay, personal liability for delays, and a screen test. Coppola got him to do a videotaped makeup test in which Brando stuffed cotton wool into his cheeks. The studio was astounded. He signed for $50,000 plus points, and later sold the points back for $100,000 — a decision Robert Evans said cost him $11 million.

On set he protected the production, threatening to walk when executives interfered with Coppola and writing that "directors are entitled to independence and freedom to realize their vision." Al Pacino credited Brando's support with saving him from being fired. Robert Duvall described the technique: "He minimized the sense of beginning. He would go in front of that camera just like he was before."

He won his second Oscar and refused it, sending the activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline on his behalf, in Plains regalia, in protest at the film industry's treatment of American Indians. The Wounded Knee occupation was underway at the time.

*Last Tango in Paris* (1972) followed — Pauline Kael wrote that Bertolucci and Brando had "altered the face of an art form," while Brando himself later said he felt "raped and manipulated" by the film. In *Apocalypse Now* (1979) he took $1 million a week for three weeks as Kurtz, arrived overweight, admitted he had not read *Heart of Darkness*, and forced Coppola to reconceive the character around whatever had actually walked onto the set.

Why Marlon Is Called a Genius

Brando has the strongest peer testimony of any actor of his century, and peer testimony is the right evidence here, because actors know exactly how hard the thing is.

Al Pacino: "It was incomprehensible how good Brando was. He was just a phenomenon. I'll be imitating him until the day I die." Paul Newman: "I'm angry at Marlon because he does everything so easily. I have to break my ass to do what he can do with his eyes closed." Laurence Olivier — the master technician against whom he is usually posed — said Brando "acted with an empathy and an instinctual understanding that not even the greatest technical performers could possibly match." Jack Nicholson: "With my generation, it was always Marlon Brando and always will be Brando." Leonard Maltin called him "the heavyweight champion of his craft."

The faculty being described is not intellect. It is an unusually accurate instinct for how people actually behave, plus the discipline to protect that accuracy from the machinery of filmmaking. Dustin Hoffman observed that Brando would keep chatting with the crew about their weekends after "action" was called, beginning the dialogue only when he could say it naturally. The cue cards, which everyone read as laziness, served the same end: asked why he used them on *The Godfather*, he said, "Because I can read them that way" — meaning a line read off a card is being read for the first time, which is what a line in life is.

The counter-case is what the historian Robert Osborne said in the same breath as his praise: "One of the great, great movie actors of all time. But I think he was also one of the biggest disappointments of all time." A decade of contemptuous work, a public refusal to take his own craft seriously, and a late career of expensive cameos. He was not a genius of application. He was a genius of instinct who repeatedly declined to use it.

Tetiaroa

He fathered at least eleven children, married twice, partnered long-term with the Tahitian actress Tarita Teriipaia, and spoke openly about his bisexuality in 1976, when almost no star would. His last years were spent in ill health and near-seclusion. He died on 1 July 2004, aged eighty, of respiratory failure. His ashes were mixed with those of his childhood best friend Wally Cox and scattered in Tahiti and Death Valley. Bertolucci's tribute stands as well as any: "With tears in my eyes, I think that in dying Marlon has become immortal."

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actor — 1973
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama — 1973
• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie — 1979
• Notable work: The Godfather
• Notable work: Apocalypse Now
• Notable work: A Streetcar Named Desire
• Notable work: On the Waterfront
• Worked as film actor, stage actor and television actor