Marlon Brando Dies.

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Marlon Brando Dies.
Sat, 07-03-2004 - 12:27am

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http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/people/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000562636


Marlon Brando, an acting icon whose Method style and brooding manner revolutionized film acting in the 1950s, has died. He was 80. Brando, who galvanized both audiences and critics with his breakthrough performances in 1951's "A Streetcar Named Desire" and 1954's "On the Waterfront" and later experienced a midlife career revival as the Mafia patriarch Don Vito Corleone in 1972's "The Godfather," died of lung failure Thursday night at UCLA Medical Center, according to Roxanne Moster, a spokeswoman for the hospital. For all the plaudits he earned -- including two Oscars and eight Academy Award nominations -- the actor's life and late career were a tempest of personal turmoil and, in the eyes of many, a disappointing squandering of talent. Still, in his late 40s he more than redeemed himself with two of his most mesmerizing portrayals: His performance as Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," for which he won his second Oscar, represented, among other things, a passing of the generational torch with Brando sharing scenes with such actors as Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan.


Duvall, who went on to appear again with Brando in "The Godfather Part II" and "Apocalypse Now," observed: "He really was the godfather to young actors coming up in the '70s and even today. He was the guy, really, more than (Laurence) Olivier, or anybody. He was a very unique guy to begin with, but he had a wonderful, facile way of dealing with irreverence, healthy irreverence. This irreverence, I think, relaxed him and made him totally in touch with himself. So, he just was able to go about (his work) in a different way."

Brando quickly followed his "Godfather" triumph with his portrayal of a man, tortured by his wife's suicide, who begins an anonymous affair in Bernardo Bertolucci's groundbreaking "Last Tango in Paris," which brought him his seventh Oscar nomination.

Instead of basking in the limelight of his "Godfather" Oscar win, however, Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather, a young woman in full Apache ceremonial attire, to decline the honor on his behalf in order to dramatize the plight of Native Americans. Although the gesture drew boos, it was indicative of Brando's restless sense of social injustice and his lifetime commitment to liberal causes, particularly those involving civil rights.

"He put his money where his mouth was," said broadcaster Larry King, who became friends with the star over the course of the interviews they did together. "If he believed in a cause, he was there to support it."

Among his many accolades, Brando was nominated for eight British Film Awards, winning three for "Viva Zapata!" "Julius Caesar" and "On the Waterfront." In more recent years, he took on few movie assignments -- often simply because he needed the money. In 1978, for example, he was paid $3 million for 12 days' work as Jor-El in "Superman" -- a record at the time.

Brando's reclusive nature and his weight battles in his later years turned him into something of a curiosity, which he himself capitalized on by agreeing to odd cameo performances for hefty paydays in projects like "Scary Movie 2." In part, his forays into these self-mocking roles also appeared to be motivated by his often-voiced disdain for the acting profession -- even as successive generations of actors continued to admire him for his earliest work.

"Marlon would hate the idea of people chiming in to give their comments about his death. All I'll say is that it makes me sad he's gone," Coppola said Friday.

Born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Neb., the Midwestern-raised Brando was introduced to acting by his mother. A sometimes actress and teacher, she gave acting lessons to another young Nebraskan, Henry Fonda. Individualistic and rebellious, Brando was expelled from a number of Midwestern schools and eventually made his way to New York to find himself. There he studied with Stella Adler and Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio.

Under Kazan's direction, Brando, playing a swaggering brute in a tight T-shirt, electrified Broadway in 1947 as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." His scream of "Stella!" across the stage created a theatrical sensation. Critic Stanley Kaufman hailed it in the New Republic, writing, "Here is a man who brings with him -- anger and genitals."

Although the performance, which was captured on film four years later, vaulted Brando into the national consciousness, he once protested to an interviewer, "Kowalski was always right, and never afraid. He never wondered, he never doubted. His ego was very secure. And he had the kind of brutal aggressiveness that I hate. I'm afraid of it. I detest the character."

At the time, Brando's rebellious manner embodied the nonconformist stirrings of the Beat generation. His first movie role was in "The Men" (1950), as a World War II veteran who returned from the war a paraplegic. True to Method form, Brando spent time in a physical therapy ward observing the lives of paraplegics. And in 1954's "The Wild One," starring as Johnny Strabler, he played a black-leather-jacketed leader of a biker gang that terrorizes a small town. Asked by a young teen what he's rebelling against, Johnny replied, "Whaddya got?"

Appearing in 1954's "On the Waterfront," Brando won his first Oscar, for his portrayal of the troubled boxer Terry Malloy, a once-promising fighter reduced to being the strong arm for a union leader. In a scene with co-star Rod Steiger, he delivered another of his signature lines: "I coulda been a contendah."

During the '50s, Brando had his pick of roles in Hollywood. He dared to sing as Sky Masterson in the musical "Guys and Dolls," and he showed a bent for comedy in "The Teahouse of the August Moon," in which he played a Japanese character, Sakini. "Sayonara" (1957), in which he played a soldier caught between love and the military, earned him his fifth Oscar nomination. And he logged another auspicious turn as a military man in "The Young Lions," starring alongside Montgomery Clift.

During the '60s, Brando weathered a series of lesser roles -- and disappointments -- including "One-Eyed Jacks," the one film he directed. The most notorious disaster was the boxoffice bomb "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962). Brando's offbeat and egocentric behavior was a contributing factor to the film's runaway budget, and his foppish portrayal of Fletcher Christian pointed the way to the actor's increasingly eccentric performances in later years.

The movie was not a total loss, though, for it introduced Brando to Tahiti, with which he became so enamored he bought his own South Pacific island. But while that setting suggested his search for a peaceful paradise, his personal life had become turbulent. He was openly unfaithful to his first wife, Anna Kashfi, from whom he separated after a year. In 1960, he married a Mexican actress, Movita, but they divorced after he met and fell in love with a Tahitian woman named Tarita, who became his third wife.

Following "Mutiny," Brando made a number of forgettable formula films. Owing to a costly divorce, court battles and his own extravagant spending, Brando was strapped for cash. His former MCA agents now headed MCA-Universal, and Brando signed a deal with the studio that called for him to do five studio films at $270,000 per film, according to biographer Peter Manso. As further compensation, Universal promised to cover the budget for his labor of love, "The Ugly American."

Brando's cinematic rebirth in the early '70s with the back-to-back triumphs of "The Godfather" and "Last Tango in Paris" proved to be short-lived.

His performance in the Western "The Missouri Breaks" -- in one scene, he wore a dress and bonnet -- was considered another oddity, and his lucrative appearance in "Superman" was regarded as something of a stunt. He finished off the decade with his role as the corpulent Kurtz character in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." Surprising and dismaying Coppola with his girth, Brando refused to learn his lines for the production. The film was legendary for its production and budget troubles but has since been listed among the century's top films and was rereleased in 2001 as "Apocalypse Now Redux."

Brando disappeared from the screen for the greater part of the '80s, not acting until 1989 with the anti-apartheid film "A Dry White Season." Playing a liberal white South African lawyer, he forsook his usual large salaries for scale rate. The portrayal won him a best supporting actor Academy Award nomination, his eighth and last such honor.

That year, however, also was one of grave personal tragedy: His son Christian was brought to trial for killing his half-sister Cheyenne's lover, Dag Drollet, and was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years. The troubled Cheyenne subsequently committed suicide in 1995 at age 25.

The '90s saw Brando deliver a decidedly mixed bag of performances, from larkish romps to grandiose put-ons. But one of the best was his pairing with Matthew Broderick in the 1990 comedy "The Freshman," directed by Andrew Bergman. Recalling how Brando was late for his first meeting with co-stars Broderick and Bruno Kirby, Bergman recalled, "Matthew and Bruno are pacing up and down the halls because they are semi-terrified and the wait is making it worse. Then the doorbell rings, and there is Marlon on his hands and knees crawling into the apartment, begging forgiveness of Matthew and Bruno for being late. It was completely disarming, and after that it was very collegial and put things in a really good place."

More recently, Brando performed in "Don Juan DeMarco" (1995) and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996), in which he camped it up for director John Frankenheimer in a large muumuu.

The actor's last film was 2001's "The Score," in which he starred opposite Robert De Niro and Edward Norton. The trio are considered by many to be the most talented performers of their respective generations, but Brando's behavior on the set remained temperamental.

Brando spent much of the '80s and '90s as a near-recluse behind his Mulholland Drive gates. Binge eating drove his weight to more than 300 pounds, as if to seemingly erase memories of the golden boy that shocked the acting world out of its complacency in the early '50s.

Biographer Peter Manso notes that many of Brando's great acting moments were not inspired by genius, but rather his inability to remember lines and having them written on props: His legendary long pauses, where he would gaze or gape at objects, that had his lines written on them, actually served as cue cards.

Nevertheless, his acting often was brilliant, exposing more of himself than less gifted players could ever hope to reach in themselves. To appreciate Brando was to realize that his emotionally tormented being was the source of his greatest performances -- Stanley Kowalski in "Streetcar," Terry Molloy in "On the Waterfront," Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather" and Paul in "Last Tango in Paris."

"If you consider the people who are myths in their own lifetime -- people like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley -- he was certainly in that rank," Bergman said. "And just to have survived that kind of life to be 80 years old is pretty remarkable. He was a tough guy."

Funeral services are to be private, according to his attorney, David J. Seeley.

cl-Libraone~

 


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