Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando Jr. (Omaha, Nebraska, April 3, 1924-Los Angeles, California, July 1, 2004) was an American film and theater actor. His theatrical training and instruction was carried out by Stella Adler, one of the most prestigious professors who developed Stanislavski's work in New York; some Saturdays he went to the Actor's Studio interested in Elia Kazan's classes. He became a stage actor in the mid-1940s, and a film actor in the early 1950s. Throughout his career, he received multiple awards for his artistic achievements, including two Best Actor Oscars—for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Godfather (1972)—, two Golden Globes and three BAFTAs.

He became known worldwide in the 1950s for his appearances in films such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), Julio César and On the Waterfront (1954), among others. Subsequently, his work in the cinema began to be more sporadic, although he recovered strength with films that are now mythical as The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). His brief role in Superman (1978) was highly commented for the four million dollars he charged for only ten minutes of appearance on screen. His last film was The Score (2001).

Biography

Early Years

He was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska under the name Marlon Brando, like his father, producer Marlon Brando, Sr. His mother was an actress and worked in local theaters. She was an important source of inspiration for his son. Brando had from a young age the gift of observing people and imitating his gestures to the extreme. He was a rebellious teenager, for which he was expelled from several schools. His father scolded him for it, but encouraged him to find his own way. Brando went to New York, where he studied acting at The New School and later at the famous Actor's Studio.

After completing his training, he began working in various seasonal theaters, until in 1944 he landed a role on Broadway in I remember Mamma, which would be followed by Candida, by George Bernard Shaw. In 1946 and before making a name for herself in theatrical circle, she attracted attention in a small play called Truckline Cafe . Brando's performance was so realistic that critic Pauline Kael came to believe that the actor was having a real seizure on stage. A few years later he became a stage star when he starred in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan. Brando knew that Williams was conducting interviews to cast for his play and auditioned him, which led to him being cast in the leading role.

Film career

First roles

Marlon Brando and Jean Peters in a frame of the advance of the 1952 film Long live Zapata!.

His first film appearance was in the 1950 film The Men, a story about war veterans who ended up with a disability. True to his method of analyzing the characters he played in order to act in accordance with them, Brando spent a month in a military hospital to prepare for his role.

The actor played a soldier wounded in battle, paralyzed from the waist down. In this first film, he managed to impress with a sensitive and introspective performance. In his early years in film, Brando displayed a total lack of interest in the conventions of the film industry, acting at his own discretion. With this he influenced other actors such as James Dean, Paul Newman, and later also Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro.

Brando found much greater success when he starred in the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire, based on the stage play he had already performed. In the film he shared roles with Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for this film, and the next three years received as many nominations for his performances in Viva Zapata, Julio César and On the Waterfront (The Law of Silence). For the latter Brando won the Hollywood Oscar.

Marlon Brando in 1950.

Because of these successes, Brando's career continued to rise. In the following years, he took part in several films of various genres, including comedy, such as The Tea House of the August Moon, in which he plays a Japanese man who acts as an interpreter for the forces of American occupation. However, in the late 1960s performances of him began to wane. Brando seemed to have lost his expressive force and the guidelines that he himself had set for himself in his work and that had given him such good results.

Despite everything, in the 1960s he worked in relevant films such as Mutiny on the Bounty, where he plays a Fletcher Christian tormented between honor and decency, surpassing the previous version from 1935 with Clark Gable. In 1961, for the first and last time, he directed and starred with Karl Malden in the film The Impenetrable Face, a notable work that received the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. He also participated in The Human Pack, by Arthur Penn; Reflections in a Golden Eye, by John Huston and The Countess from Hong Kong , directed by Charles Chaplin and where he had Sophia Loren as a partner.

Decline

In the early 1970s, Marlon Brando's appearance changed from an athletic figure to an obese, hermit-looking person, somewhat decadent, almost unrecognizable. The producers were not interested in working with Brando for new roles, nor was he interested in doing so, unless his financial situation required him to go out and find an agent to represent him before the producers or move his network of contacts. He lived a secluded life on his private island in Tahiti.

Vito Corleone and last roles

In the early 1970s, he was given the opportunity to play the boss of a mafia family in The Godfather, based on a novel by Mario Puzo. It was Brando who insisted on a film test of the character played by him, and personally took care of the makeup. Director Francis Ford Coppola was impressed by Brando portrayed as Vito Corleone and had to fight to convince the producers to accept Brando for this role.

Marlon Brando during an interview in the '70s.

For that performance Brando got his second Oscar. On this occasion Brando rejected the Oscar, the second time in Hollywood history that an actor did this (the first time had been rejected by actor George C. Scott). Rather than accept the award, Brando sent a posing Native American actress named Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony, who spoke out against the treatment of her people in Hollywood movies and the events that followed. they were happening at Wounded Knee back then. In support of Littlefeather's pronouncement, Brando spoke out saying: "It seemed absurd to me to go to the awards ceremony. It was grotesque to celebrate an industry that had systematically maligned and disfigured Native Americans over the course of six decades."

Since then, Brando's career has been very uneven. He shot some films well received by critics, such as Last Tango in Paris (1972), for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He briefly participated in others simply for money, such as Superman (1978); His fee was $4 million for a ten-minute role (he received $250,000 for each day's work). He gained a reputation as a conflicted and demanding actor; for example, in Apocalypse Now (1979), a film in which he plays the renegade Colonel Kurtz, he initially refused to travel to the Philippines, despite having received an advance. When director Francis Ford Coppola managed to convince him, Brando turned up shaved-headed and overweight, forcing him to shoot scenes in shadows. For the sequel to Superman (Superman II, 1980), Brando had recorded several scenes returning to his role as Jor-El, but after the change of director from Richard Donner to Richard Lester, Brando demanded to raise his fee for the use of his likeness, prompting the producers to change his scenes and role to Susannah York.

His characterization as Tomás de Torquemada in Cristóbal Colón: el descubrimiento (1992) was interesting but historically inaccurate. Through it all, he continued to be considered a great actor, still cast in roles that bear a shadow of his former glory. He highlights Don Juan DeMarco (1995), where he played a veteran psychiatrist about to retire, who in matters of love is lectured by his last patient, Johnny Depp, with whom he forged friendship in real life In said film he had Faye Dunaway as a partner .

In 2001 he appeared in the short (video clip) for the song You rock my world, by Michael Jackson, as a mob boss in the style of The Godfather.

Between 2003 and 2004 (shortly before his death and being his last job) he lent his voice to interpret Vito Corleone again, in the additional dialogues incorporated into the The Godfather video game, published (due to several delays) in 2006, signifying a resounding success in sales.

In 2006, thanks to technology, he reappeared as Jor-El, Superman's father, in the movie Superman Returns. That same year, Richard Donner, director of Superman: The Movie, carried out a project in which he published the unpublished scenes of Brando, in his role as Jor-El, in the movie Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut.

Private life

Marlon Brando, 24, 1948.

His private life was stormy since childhood and has been recounted with variable accuracy in multiple books. It is said that her mother was emotionally unstable (bipolar disorder) and that young Marlon witnessed how she received multiple men who occasionally mistreated her. Extraordinarily handsome since he was a child, Marlon did not take well to the effect that his masculine attractiveness had on people, and some unconfirmed testimonies suggest that he chose from an early age to physically punish himself and neglect himself in response to his appearance; though he also exploited her for roles, he likewise maintained many occasional mistresses and was the father of at least eleven children.

Brando was expelled from the Shattuck Military Academy at age seventeen for bad behavior. After this, he decided to follow his sister Jocelyn Brando to New York, to study theater with Stella Adler, a disciple of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski.

Brando's stormy temperament came to light when the terrible relationship he had with his domineering and irritating father, who never recognized his acting achievements, was exposed and was very strained until the end of his life.

Brando was married three times and had eleven children. His first marriage, to Anna Kashfi, was publicly stormy and lasted two years.

The second marriage was with Movita Castaneda, but their relationship ended when he met his third wife, Tarita Teriipia, the Tahitian woman who played his partner in Rebellion on Board during the filming of the film. > (Mutiny on the Bounty), with whom he had two children and was together for ten years. As a result of that film, Brando also fell in love with Tahiti and bought a small island in the archipelago in 1966, where he lived when his professional obligations allowed. He also had coexistence problems with Tarita, despite her extraordinary efforts to preserve her marriage. Tarita, once divorced in 1972, revealed the marital intimacies of her failed marriage, publicly denigrating her ex-husband as a self-centered, selfish, jealous and unfaithful person. After the actor's death, Tarita published a biographical book entitled Brando, my love and my torment.

He was involved in many advocacy activities for African Americans and Native Americans during the 1960s, and at one point managed to rub shoulders with Richard Nixon and the Kennedy family.

The episode in which he starred in the 1973 Oscar ceremony is famous when he refused to collect the award and instead sent to the ceremony an American actress of indigenous origin, Sacheen Littlefeather, who spoke out against the treatment he received received his people in Hollywood movies and by the events that were happening at that time in Wounded Knee.

In 1976 he told a French journalist: "Homosexuality is so fashionable that it is no longer news. Like many men, I too have had homosexual experiences and I'm not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think of me. But if anyone is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, let them remain convinced. I find it funny".

In 1990 he experienced one of his greatest personal tragedies. Her daughter Cheyenne's boyfriend was murdered at the family residence on Mulholland Drive. The situation became a media circus when Christian (the eldest born from his first marriage) was accused of being the material author of the murder. The episode deeply marked his family environment: Christian was forced to serve six years in prison and his daughter Cheyenne committed suicide five years later.

According to a biography titled Brando in the Sunset, written by Patricia Ruiz, Brando spent his last years on the brink of destitution living on his Social Security, became a hermit and sold his possessions in Tahiti in order to survive.

He died on July 1, 2004 in Los Angeles, at the age of 80, as a result of pulmonary fibrosis.

In 2013, actress Maria Schneider declared that the rape scene in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris was real and that it was done outside of the original script, at the suggestion Brando himself. And that his tears in the scene were real, a fact confirmed by the director.

Filmography

Marlon Brando next to Pina Pellicer in an advertising photo for the movie One-Eyed Jacks (1961).

Marlon Brando in the film trailer A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Marlon Brando in A tram called desire (1951).

Cinema

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Golden Globe Awards

BAFTA Awards

Cannes International Film Festival

Tokyo Festival

San Sebastian International Film Festival