Brando: A Centenary Celebration

With Elia Kazan's controversial drama, On the Waterfront (1954), back in cinemas to mark the 70th anniversary of its release, Cinema Paradiso pays centenary tribute to its Oscar-winning star, Marlon Brando.

'If I hadn't been an actor,' Marlon Brando once confessed, 'I've often thought I'd have become a con man and wound up in jail.' In his 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, he claimed that actors were professional liars. 'I'm good at telling lies smoothly,' he wrote, 'giving an impression of things as they are not and making people think I'm sincere.' However, he gave away more than he intended when he concluded, 'A good con man can fool anybody, but the first person he fools is himself.'

Just three years before his death, the 78 year-old Brando needed some money in a hurry. He had joked about selling items on QVC, but hit upon the idea of giving acting lessons to the showbiz elite. The plan was for Tony Kaye, the director of American History X (1998), to use seven cameras to film the symposium, entitled 'Lying For a Living', as the likes of Robin Williams, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Michael Jackson, Edward James Olmos, Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Voight, Peter Coyote, Leonardo DiCaprio, Harry Dean Stanton, Drew Barrymore, and Elizabeth Taylor sat at the feet of the Master of the Method. However, things didn't go entirely to plan.

As one might have hoped, accounts vary as to what happened during the 10- or 15-day workshop. Rolling Stone and Hollywood Reporter concur that the 300lb actor made an appearance dressed as a buxom Englishwoman. The former insists that Brando wore Chinese silk pajamas and a cobalt-blue scarf, while a make-up girl painted his nails red while two students improvised a scene. More dramatically, the latter avers that the two-time Oscar winner stepped on stage in a black dress with an orange scarf, blonde wig, and blue mascara. Holding a red rose, he sat on a chair and applied pink lipstick before declaring in a female English accent, 'I am furious! Furious!'

As the Hollywood Reporter reveals that the 10-minute improvised monologue ended with Brando hitching up his skirt and mooning the audience, it won't come as a surprise to learn that no footage of this masterclass has ever been released. The same goes for the sessions involving a used-car salesman, a homeless African American named Jim, an LAPD officer, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, and two dwarfs and a Samoan wrestler who worked as a bodyguard at Neverland Ranch. By all accounts, one session involved Black people being asked to act white and vice versa, while another required attendees to strip naked. No, we won't be seeing those tapes any time soon.

'Acting is the dumbest profession in the world,' Brando once opined, as few performers make a sustained living and they rarely have any say in how the work turns out. Considering he is regarded as the finest American screen actor of all time, it's odd that he never featured in a incontrovertible artistic masterpiece. So, does Marlon Brando still matter and why should we continue to watch his films? Cinema Paradiso investigates.

Method in the Madness

Given that he turned stage and screen acting upside down, it seems apt that Marlon Brando, Jr. was a breech baby, who made his entrance just after 11pm on 3 April 1924 at the Omaha Maternity Hospital. Like older sisters, Frances (Frannie) and Jocelyn (Tiddy), he acquired a nickname and close friends continued to call him Bud for the rest of his life. Marlon, Sr. was a travelling salesman, whose air of strict aloofness meant that clouts were more frequent than hugs. Brando compared his father to Victor McLaglen, a core member of John Ford's stock company who won the Oscar for Best Actor for The Informer (1935).

'It was an era,' Brando would later note, 'when a travelling salesman slipped five dollars to a bellboy, who would return with a pint of whisky and a hooker. My pop was such a man.' Less generously, he dubbed him 'a bar fighter. He was a man with not much love in him. Staying away from home, drinking and whoring all around the Midwest. He used to slap me around, and for no good reason.' Frequently mocking his son's voice, looks, and mien, Marlon, Sr. never paid him a compliment. Even after Junior won his first Academy Award, Senior replied to Edward R. Murrow's inquiry during a live telecast about whether he was proud of his boy, with the words, 'As an actor, not too proud, but as a man, quite proud.'

By contrast, mother Dorothy (née Pennebaker) was devoted and nurturing. She had taken leads in productions of Anna Christie and Pygmalion (which were respectively filmed in 1930 and 1938 ) at the Omaha Community Playhouse, where she once co-starred with 21 year-old Henry Fonda in Beyond the Horizon. Like Brando, he was a Nebraskan, as were Fred Astaire and Montgomery Clift.

However, Dodie also had an alcohol problem. Brando later recalled, 'When my mother drank, her breath had a sweetness to it I lack the vocabulary to describe.' But he also remembered 'the anguish that her drinking produced was that she preferred getting drunk to caring for us'. Starkly branding her 'the town drunk', he described how she had started to dissolve and fray at the edges: 'When my mother was missing. Gone off someplace, we didn't know where she was. I used to have to go and get her out of jail. Memories even now that fill me with shame and anger.'

When Bud was six, Marlon, Sr. was offered a sales manager job by the Calcium Carbonate Corporation. As the Great Depression was starting to bite, the family moved to Evanston, Illinois. However, Dodie was often absent pursuing her acting ambitions or her lovers and the young Brando became deeply attached to Ermi, the housekeeper. He would later state that on the day she left to get married (without telling him), 'I became estranged from this world.' His sense of abandonment prompted him to misbehave at school, where he forged a friendship with fellow prankster Wally Cox that would last until his death in 1973.

In 1936, Brando's parents separated and the siblings joined Dodie in Santa Ana, California. Two years later, however, they reunited with their father in a farmhouse in Libertyville, Illinois. Bud attended the local high school, where he was forced to repeat a year for failing at everything except drama and sports. He also formed his own band, Brando & His Kegliners, and nursed ambitions of becoming a drummer. But, when he was fired from his job as a cinema usher for stuffing rotting broccoli and limburger cheese into the air conditioning system after refusing to wear a shirt under his jacket, Marlon, Sr. decided that his heir needed to learn a little discipline.

He dispatched Bud to his alma mater, Shattuck Military Academy, where he played American football and made his acting debut in Herman Stuart Cottman and Le Vergne Shaw's one-act play, A Message From Khufu. During the holidays, he joined Dodie at the repertory theatre where she was now an acting coach. But, in 1943, he was placed on probation for insubordination during a military exercise and was expelled after ignoring an order confining him to campus. Undeterred, Brando got a job digging ditches and applied to join the US Army. Declared unfit because of a knee injury sustained on the football field, he found himself without a plan. On looking back, however, he realised that his schooldays had shaped the mindset that would make him such a mould-breaking actor. 'I did my best to tear the school apart and not get caught at it,' he admitted in his memoir, 'I wanted to destroy the place. I hated authority and did everything I could to defeat it by resisting it, subverting it, tricking it and outmanoeuvring it.'

Bolt From the Blue

After briefly contemplating life as a Protestant preacher, Brando followed Jocelyn to New York. She had made her Broadway debut in a 1942 play that had closed after five performances. But she recognised that her brother enjoyed acting and encouraged him to enrol in the drama workshop run by German director Erwin Piscator at the New School For Social Research.

Sleeping on classmates' couches, Brando continued to rebel against authority, with Elaine Stritch recalling, 'He was laughing at all of us. I have a memory of him laughing at everything and everybody.' However, director friend George Englund insists that Brando found a haven in acting because 'he was accepted there. He wasn't criticised. It was the first time in his life that he heard good things about himself.'

Piscator cast Brando in Gerhart Hauptmann's Hannele's Way to Heaven and William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. He also played a guard and a giraffe in Stanley Kauffman's musical fantasy, Bobino (1944), at The American Theater for Young Folks. It was his brush with the Bard that landed him the part of the 15 year-old Nels in John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), which was filmed by George Stevens four years later.

The famous stage duo of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were so keen to have Brando play Lunt's son in O Mistress Mine that they coached him for the audition. But the rebel refused to read his lines because he had started taking classes with Stella Adler, who taught the 'system' devised by Konstantin Stanislavski that encouraged performers to use their imagination in order to find a character's inner motivation and, thus, achieve psychological realism. While rival coach Lee Strasberg favoured mining the memory to justify a character's words and actions, Adler prompted her students to improvise and spontaneity became the cornerstone of Brando's technique.

Adler told the story about asking her class to behave like chickens awaiting a nuclear explosion. Everyone ran around in a panic. But Brando sat motionless and mimed laying an egg. When Adler asked him to explain his choice, he had replied, 'I'm a chicken - what do I know about bombs?' Classmate Mae Cooper recalled watching Brando act. 'It gave you the chills, it was so good, so quiet, like the dawn of something great…It was like suddenly you woke up and there's your idiot child playing Mozart. It made your hair stand on end.'

Brando's new approach didn't go down well with his New School colleagues, although it was his insubordination that led to him being dropped from a summer stock production at Sayville on Long Island. Such was Adler's conviction that he had something special, however, that she persuaded director Harold Clurman to cast him as war veteran Sage McRae in Maxwell Anderson's left-leaning drama, Truckline Cafe. The play flopped, but the New York Drama Critics still voted Brando the year's Most Promising Young Actor. Moreover, the production led to Clurman introducing Brando to Elia Kazan, who had just branched out from Broadway to make his Hollywood debut with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945).

Brando joined Kazan for the odd session at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, but he always denied that he had been a major influence on his style. 'After I had some success,' Brando wrote, 'Lee Strasberg tried to take credit for teaching me how to act. 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 was an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio and tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshipped him, but I never knew why.'

Despite acquiring a reputation for being a handful, Brando was cast as David, a militant Holocaust survivor, in Ben Hecht's A Flag is Born (1946), a drama about the campaign for a Jewish state that co-starred Paul Muni and Stella Adler's half-sister, Celia, who had been a leading light in pre-war Yiddish theatre. Another stage legend, Katharine Cornell, took a shine to Brando and hired him to play Marchbanks in George Bernard Shaw's Candida and the Messenger in Jean Anouilh's Antigone (both 1946).

Like Cornell, Tallulah Bankhead preferred the stage to the screen, although they had both appeared in Frank Borzage's flagwaver, Stage Door Canteen, before Bankhead went on to excel in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (both 1943). Finding Brando at a loose end after he had turned down Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh because he had dozed off while reading the 'ineptly written and poorly constructed' manuscript, Bankhead offered him the role of Stanislas in Eagle Rampant, a reworking of Jean Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two Heads.

Despite disliking Stanislavskian posturing, Bankhead overlooked Brando's poor audition to take him on an out-of-town tour prior to the play's Broadway opening. However, it proved to be an unhappy experience for them both. Although Bankhead reminded him of his mother, Brando decided the grande dame needed taking down a peg or two and did everything he could on stage to unsettle her. When not mumbling his lines, he would fiddle with props, pick his nose, and scratch his crotch in order to goad his co-star. 'There were a few times when he was really magnificent,' Bankhead later conceded. 'He was a great young actor when he wanted to be, but most of the time I couldn't even hear him on the stage.'

The critics weren't particularly impressed, either, with one in Boston opining of his death scene, 'Brando looked like a car in midtown Manhattan searching for a parking space.' Eventually, Bankhead had enough and sacked him. However, in a letter declining the role of Blanche DuBois that Tennessee Williams had written for her in A Streecar Named Desire, she had confided: 'I do have one suggestion for casting. I know of an actor who can appear as this brutish Stanley Kowalski character. I mean, a total pig of a man without sensitivity or grace of any kind. Marlon Brando would be perfect as Stanley. I have just fired the cad from my play, The Eagle Has Two Heads, and I know for a fact that he is looking for work.'

Producer Irene Selznick had wanted John Garfield for the part and had considered Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster when Garfield had made unreasonable demands. But Kazan was intrigued by the idea of a younger man playing Stanley and he arranged a meeting with Williams at his home on Cape Cod. Brando immediately made a good impression by restoring the playwright's electricity and fixing his plumbing. Thus, within 10 minutes of a read-through, Williams had called Selznick to give his approval. 'It had not occurred to me before what excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in the part,' he wrote to his agent. 'It humanises the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man. I don't want to focus guilt or blame particularly on any one character but to have it a tragedy of misunderstanding and insensitivity to others. A new value came out of Brando's reading which was by far the best reading I have ever heard. He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans.'

Remembering Adler's maxims, 'Your talent is in your choices' and 'Don't be boring', Brando based his portrayal on boxer Rocky Graziano, whom he had studied at his gym. The fighter got the surprise of his life when he saw the play and recognised himself. But the critics were even more taken aback when Streetcar opened on 3 December 1947. They concurred that a star had been born and that stage acting would never be the same again. But, while Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Jessica Tandy received the Tony Award for Best Actess, Brando got nothing. Thus, he decided to turn his back on the theatre - and the physical and psychological demands of having to give several strenuous performances a week - and head to Hollywood, where he could exploit his new-found fame and make better money for a fraction of the effort.

Taking Hollywood By Storm

In 1947, Hal Wallis invited Brando for a screen test. Warner Bros had acquired the rights to Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath by prison psychologist Robert M. Lindner and had Brando read scenes from an unfinished screenplay. The 23 year-old was underwhelmed by the experience and turned down a weekly salary of $3000 in order to return to Broadway. The role had changed considerably by time James Dean played it in Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) - but, then, so had screen acting.

By the end of his run in Streetcar, Brando had become bored with stage acting. Indeed, he would only return to the theatre once more, as Sergius in a summer stock production of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man (1953). He had played none of the roles in Shakespeare, Chekhov, or Ibsen that many classical actors had tackled during their apprenticeship. Indeed, he had little experience of the major American playwrights of his day. But one intuitive performance had convinced everyone who mattered that a genius had come among them and Brando was not about to disabuse them.

Frustrated at having lost out to William Holden on the role of screenwriter Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Brando spent a month at the Birmingham Army Hospital in Van Nuys in order to prepare for playing paraplegic war veteran Ken Wilcheck in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (both 1950). But, while the reviews were positive, the only Oscar nomination went to Carl Foreman's screenplay. Some have speculated that the role helped Brando avoid the draft for the Korean War, as he was now eligible after having had surgery on his knee. At his board, he responded to a questionnaire by claiming that his race was 'human', while his colour was 'seasonal-oyster white to beige'. Having informed an Army doctor that he had problems with authority and was psychoneurotic, he was excused service.

This left him clear to reprise the role of Stanley in Kazan's 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, although he might have missed out had a network bought the 1950 pilot movie, Come Out Fighting, in which he had played boxer Jimmy Brand. Karl Malden and Kim Hunter reprised their roles and won Academy Awards. As did Vivien Leigh, who had been cast as Blanche instead of Jessica Tandy. However, while Brando received his first Oscar nomination, he was beaten by Humphrey Bogart for his performance in John Huston's The African Queen (1951).

He would lose out the following year to another old school screen actor, Gary Cooper for his role in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon. In retrospect, however, this is perhaps not a bad thing, as there's something distasteful about the make-up applied to Brando's eyes in order to make him look more Mexican as revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata in Kazan's Viva Zapata! (both 1952). In order to heighten the on-screen tension between siblings Emiliano and Eufemio, Kazan told Anthony Quinn that Brando had been unimpressed with his performance as Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and it was only years later that the pair discovered they had been duped by the director.

Despite being feted by the studio chiefs, Brando refused to sign a contract that would tie him down and force him to accept roles like the jealous husband in David Butler's Sudden Fear (1952). Acting as her own executive producer. Joan Crawford had pursued Brando for a part that would earn Jack Palance an Oscar nomination. But he made it clear he was no actor for hire. Hence, he turned down John Gielgud's offer to act on stage in London after they had co-starred as Mark Antony and Cassius in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's classy take on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1953). Mankiewicz had courted Paul Scofield for the role, but had soon been won over. John Huston was also been blown away, enthusing about Brando's performance: 'It was like a furnace door opening - the heat came off the screen. I don't know another actor who could do that.'

For teenagers around the world, however, it was the role of Johnny Strabler that made Brando an anti-establishment icon. Bedecked in leathers and riding his own Triumph Thunderbird 6T, he embodied subversion in Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One (1953). One can almost see the likes of James Dean and Elvis Presley shifting in their cinema seats as they heard Brando respond to Mary Murphy's question, 'What're you rebelling against, Johnny?', with the sneering line, 'Whaddya got?'

Brando himself identified with the outsider who made people uncomfortable. 'More than most parts I've played in the movies or on stage,' he wrote in his autobiography, 'I related to Johnny, and because of this, I believe I played him as more sensitive and sympathetic than the script envisioned. 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.'

In fact, the 29 year-old Brando was too old for the role and the picture has not worn that well. As a snapshot of the reaction of American youth to the conformism of Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency, however, it retains its value. Similarly, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) continues to offer insights into the mentality of those who had been friendly witnesses in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's inquiry into Communism in Hollywood. Brando had been disappointed by Kazan's decision to testify and had originally rejected the role of washed-up boxer Terry Molloy that was so coveted by Frank Sinatra. But, as he wrote in Songs My Mother Taught Me, 'None of us is perfect and I think that Gadg has done injury to others, but mostly to himself.'

Written by Budd Schulberg, this exposé of union intimidation and corruption among New Jersey longshoremen has come to be seen as an apologia for collaborating with HUAC. But it's also a potent human drama, in which Brando's scenes with Rod Steiger as his brother and a debuting Eva Marie Saint as his sweetheart retain their power and poignancy. Indeed, one improvised speech has not been diminished by the passage of time: 'You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.'

Saint (who is the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner) won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, while Brando became the youngest ever winner of Best Actor at 30 years and 361 days. He has since been pipped by Richard Dreyfuss, who was 30 years and 156 days when he won for Herbert Ross's The Goodbye Girl (1977), and Adrien Brody, who was 29 years and 343 days when he triumphed in Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002).

In truth, Brando was more delighted at being paid $100,000 for a picture that went on to gross $4.2 million at the US box office. He had no use for the statuette that ended up in the possession of Leonardo DiCaprio, as Cassius Michael Kim reveals in his Jho Low documentary, Man on the Run (2023). Indeed, Brando disliked his performance. 'On the day Gadg showed me the complete picture,' he wrote, 'I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screening room...I thought I was a huge failure.'

He wasn't alone, however. In a scathing Variety article entitled, 'The Inarticulate Era (Of Mumblers, Grunters & Groaners) ', John Horn declared: 'In motion pictures, for instance, the idol of the day is Marlon Brando, who has made quite a career of talking as if he doesn't know how to. In the Broadway play, A Streetcar Named Desire, his first hit, Brando grunted and groaned to perfection in his depiction of a brute who was all muscle and no mind. In the Oscared On the Waterfront, Brando "duh-ed" and "dah-ed" in almost a symphony of animal sounds, playing, of course, a young dock walloper who just can't get the words out.'

Amusing though it is, this was a cheap shot. But, notwithstanding the emergence of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, Dennis Hopper, Joanne Woodward, and others (including, briefly, Marilyn Monroe), not everyone believed that Adler and Strasberg had transformed American acting for the better. Consequently, there were many ready to knock Brando off a perch that he was already beginning to find decidedly uncomfortable.

Drifting With the Hype

Almost as soon as he became the toast of Hollywood, Brando lost interest. He had already been passed over for the role of Norman Maine opposite Judy Garland in George Cukor's A Star Is Born (1954) by the time Kazan tried to team him with Montgomery Clift as the Trask brothers in John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955). Kazan wound up, however, with James Dean and Richard Davalos. Similarly, Luchino Visconti wanted to pair Brando and Ingrid Bergman in Senso (1954) and had to settle for Farley Granger and Alida Valli. Ironically, later the same year, Granger refused to take on the role vacated by Brando in Michael Curtiz's The Egyptian and Edmund Purdom got his moment in the spotlight.

In order to avoid a $2 million lawsuit for breaking his deal with 20th Century-Fox (which he had signed in invisible ink as a joke), Brando was forced to play Napoleon Bonaparte opposite Jean Simmons in Henry Koster's Désirée (1954). This CinemaScope presentation was rightly nominated for its costumes and sets, but the reviews were mixed and the chemistry between the leads was readily more apparent when they reunited as Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's take on the Frank Loesser musical, Guys and Dolls (1955).

Gene Kelly had set his heart on the picture and was furious when MGM refused to loan him to Samuel Goldwyn. Frank Sinatra was also miffed at having to play rival gambler Nathan Detroit and called Brando 'Mumbles' throughout the shoot. However, Brando got his own back by making Sinatra (who liked to work quickly) eat Mindy's cheesecake in 35 retakes of a diner scene. Having already declined Fred Zinnemann's offer to headline Oklahoma! (1955) because of his musical limitations, Brando was left to do the best he could. 'I couldn't hit a note with a baseball bat,' he confessed in the Maysles documentary short, Meet Marlon Brando (1966), 'some notes I missed by extraordinary margins... They sewed my words together on one song so tightly that when I mouthed it in front of the camera, I nearly asphyxiated myself.'

Sinatra got his own back by inheriting the role of Frankie Machine left by John Garfield's sudden death in Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm (1955). Relations remained cool and, as a result, Elvis Presley and Steve Forrest got to play the Burton brothers in Don Siegel's Flaming Star (1960) rather than Marlon and Frank.

By this stage, Brando had already given up learning lines and drove some directors crazy by placing cue cards around the set. He insisted, however, that this technique prevented him from simply regurgitating scripted screeds. As he later said, 'If you don't know what the words are but you have a general idea of what they are, then you look at the cue card and it gives you the feeling to the viewer, hopefully, that the person is really searching for what he is going to say - that he doesn't know what to say.'

As he had refused to sign a studio contract in order to keep his options open, there is no one but Brando to blame for the decision to play Japanese interpreter Sakini in yellowface in Daniel Mann's adaptation of The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), a reworking of a Vern J. Schneider novel about the US occupation of Okinawaka that had earned playwright John Patrick a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. A James Michener tome about the Korean War provided the impetus for Joshua Logan's Sayonara (1957), which sees USAF Major Lloyd Gruver fall for Japanese dancer, Hana-ogi (Miiko Taka). Miyoshi Umeki and Red Buttons won Oscars in the supporting roles, as this frank study of racial prejudice landed nine nominations and set a trend for Brando taking on projects that addressed social issues in the hope of improving the world. However, Kazan decided to cast Andy Griffith rather than Brando as Lonesome Larry Rhodes in his satirical treatise on television and transient fame, A Face in the Crowd (1957).

Partnering with Paramount, Brando founded his own production company, Pennebaker, which he named for Dodie, who had died in 1954. According to biographer Peter Manso, 'She was the one who could give him approval like no one else could and, after his mother died, it seems that Marlon stops caring.' However, he continued to seek contentious roles and dyed his hair blonde to play Lieutenant Christian Diestl in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions (1958), an adaptation of an Irwin Shaw novel that chronicled how a German ski instructor became disenchanted during the course of the war with the Nazism he had once so eagerly embraced.

Despite being keen to show how 'bad' people are often 'misled' rather than simply being 'evil', Brando opted not to star with Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958), in which two chained prisoners have to collaborate in order to escape. Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck, and Frank Sinatra all swerved the project before Tony Curtis came aboard, dashing Sammy Davis, Jr.'s hopes of partnering Elvis Presley. His rise had inspired Tennessee Williams to write Orpheus Descending for Brando to make a triumphant return to Broadway. However, he chose instead to co-star with Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward as Valentine 'Snakeskin' Xavier in Sidney Lumet's screen version, The Fugitive Kind (1960), a Southern Gothic melodrama that left many wondering what had happened to the dangerous young man who had started the decade with such a bang.

Rebel With a Cause

Life changed forever for Marlon Brando during the 1960s. But he seemed out of step with the decade's seismic cultural shifts, even though his finger was very much on the socio-political pulse. He might have found himself on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), but Brando loathed rock music, which he claimed had been appropriated by privileged white kids. 'You're not going to call The Rolling Stones artists,' he once fumed. 'I heard somebody compare them - or The Beatles - to Bach. It was claimed they had created something as memorable and as important as Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert. I hate rock 'n' roll. It's ugly. I liked it when the Blacks had it in 1927.'

Back at the day job, Brando had turned down the lead in William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1959) in order to reunite with old friend Karl Malden as bank robber Rio and reformed lawman Dad Longworth in Stanley Kubrick's Western, One-Eyed Jacks. As it was a Pennebaker production, Brando had intervened to remove Sam Peckinpah as screenwriter. But casting Malden over Spencer Tracy had alienated Kubrick, who quit two weeks before shooting was due to begin in 1958. Brando volunteered to direct, but exposed a million feet of VistaVision film, as the three-month shoot doubled in length and it took another three years to edit a picture that Brando had all but abandoned.

He never directed again and came close to walking away from acting after his experience of making Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Following a backlash in the British press, he had reneged on taking the lead in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - and would later back out of Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Ryan's Daughter (1970). He also declined Joseph L. Mankiewicz's offer to reprise the role of Mark Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). But he did get to lock horns with Trevor Howard (whom Mankiewicz had wanted for Julius Caesar) in the roles of Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian that had been taken by Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in Frank Lloyd's 1935 Best Picture-winning account of the 1789 maritime insurrection in the South Pacific Ocean.

Initially delighted to be working in Tahiti (which had long fascinated him), Brando started to tire of sticking to the ever-changing script and his habit of improvising wore down director Carol Reed. He was replaced by Lewis Milestone, who had been directing since 1925 and had won Oscars for Two Arabian Nights (1928) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). However, Brando thought he knew best and essentially called the shots by withholding his labour unless he got his own way. MGM nearly sank, as the budget spiralled to $18.5 million and rewrites continued long after shooting had wrapped. Indeed, George Seaton directed an ending suggested by Billy Wilder towards the end of the editing process, but Brando had long lost interest in 'perhaps my very worst experience in making a motion picture. I never want to do that kind of picture again as long as I live.'

Yet, the enterprise was to shape Brando's future, as he bought the Polynesian atoll of Tetiaroa and settled there with third wife, Tahitian actress Tarita Teriipaia, whom he had personally cast as Princess Maimiti. Ironically, second wife Maria Castaneda (whose stage name was Movita) had played Tehanni in the 1935 version of Bounty. They had married in 1960, only for the union to be annulled in 1968 because her 1944 divorce had not been legal. Brando's own first marriage had barely lasted two years and resulted in a lengthy custody battle for his son, Christian, with Anna Kashfi, a model who claimed to be Indian, although she had really only been born there to British parents, as Joan O'Callaghan.

This already complicated private life would become even more fraught for Brando and his 11 children. For now, however, he had to contend with juggling a need for money with a growing reputation around Hollywood for being difficult. Deciding that a little stability was in order, Brando signed a five-year deal with Universal Studios, who promptly cast him as Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite in George Englund's The Ugly American (1963), an adaptation of a novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer that was billed as 'The Most Important Adventure of Our Time', as the US became increasingly involved in the conflict in Vietnam.

Despite earning Brando a Golden Globe nomination, the picture was received with little enthusiasm. The same was true of Ralph Levy's Bedtime Story (1964), which teamed Brando with David Niven as con men Freddy Benson and Lawrence Jameson. This is actually good fun, although it has since been overshadowed by the teamings of Steve Martin and Michael Caine in Frank Oz's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway in Chris Addison's The Hustle (2019).

This rare excursion into comedy was followed by Bernhard Wicki's Morituri (1965), a Second World War thriller that follows the efforts of German pacifist Robert Crain to sabotage a merchant ship skippered by the disillusioned Nazi captain, Mueller (Yul Brynner). Again relishing the chance to show off his Teutonic accent, Brando made a convincing SS martinet. But the script was criticised for lacking tension and Brando embarked upon Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966) on something of a losing streak.

Scripted by Lillian Hellman from a Horton Foote novel, the action centres on Sheriff Calder, as he waits for prison escapee Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford) to come home to his wife, Anna (Jane Fonda), who is having an affair with his best friend, Jake (James Fox). Despite exploring the shifting morality of the times, this underrated saga is best known for the scene in which Calder is brutally beaten by a vigilante. But it's not regarded as one of Brando's finest hours. Nor is Sidney J. Furie's The Appaloosa (1966), in which bearded buffalo hunter Matt Fletcher (Brando, with a dodgy Hispanic accent) has a prized horse stolen by Mexican bandit Chuy Medina (John Saxon). But this latterday Western would make for half of an intriguing double bill with Ed Harris's 2008 remake, Appaloosa, which is also available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

Unenthused by the prospect of playing Anne Bancroft's husband in Mike Nichols's The Graduate, Brando leapt at the chance to work with Charlie Chaplin on A Countess From Hong Kong (both 1967). Unfortunately, he found the silent master's approach to be stiffly old-fashioned, while the story of the romance between diplomat Ogden Mears and Russian castaway Natascha (Sophia Loren) was so coolly received that Chaplin never directed again.

John Huston's adaptation of Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) was a marked improvement, although it's not currently available to rent. Brando took the role of Major Weldon Penderton after Montgomery Clift had suffered a fatal heart attack and Richard Burton and Peter Finch had turned down the chance to co-star with Elizabeth Taylor. She was distraught by the loss of her friend and this bold study of repressed sexuality has since been rather forgotten among the pictures that helped bring down the Production Code in 1968.

One can only presume that Christian Marquand's sex comedy, Candy, had the same agenda. Based on a Terry Southern novel that owed much to Voltaire's Candide (1759), this picaresque romp cast Brando as Grindl, a sham New York guru who tries to seduce Candy Christian (Ewa Aulin) through the 'seven stages of enlightenment'. Richard Burton, James Coburn, and Ringo Starr also took cameos, but this psychedelic satire lacked the charm of George Dunning's Yellow Submarine or Bob Rafelson's Head (all 1968), which respectively featured The Beatles and The Monkees.

Determined to resist the mainstream, Brando turned down Franklin A. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968) and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) in order to sign up to Hubert Cornfield's The Night of the Following Day (1969). He plays Bud, the chauffeur who conspires to abduct a young woman (Pamela Franklin) with the thuggish Leer (Richard Boone) and an air hostess named Viv. The latter was played by Rita Moreno, who fell heavily for Brando and attempted suicide after he paid for her to have an abortion. This hardly seemed like the behaviour of someone who had spent much of the decade supporting worthy causes in an effort to change American hearts and minds. 'With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world,' he had announced, 'making movies seemed increasingly silly and irrelevant, and I felt I had to do what I could to make things better.'

He was particularly involved in the struggle for Civil Rights and joined Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, James Garner, Charlton Heston, and Burt Lancaster on the March on Washington in August 1963. Brando can be seen in Ely A. Landau's epic documentary, King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis (1970). Moreover, he dropped out of Elia Kazan's The Arrangement following Martin Luther King's assassination, as 'I felt I'd better go find out where it is; what it is to be Black in this country; what this rage is all about.' It was in this spirit that he joined Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! (1969) to play Sir William Walker, a British agent provocateur who is sent in 1844 to Queimada, an island in the Lesser Antilles, in order to engineer a slave revolt against the Portuguese imperialist rulers.

Ignoring studio pressure to use Sidney Poitier as the slave leader, Pontecorvo cast illiterate Colombian herdsman Evaristo Márquez, which delighted Brando, who felt he did some of his best acting in the film. However, his voice can only be heard in the shorter English-language version, as Giuseppe Rinaldi dubbed the lines in the Italian cut, which some considered as politically significant as its predecessor, The Battle of Algiers (1966). Brando declared it his favourite among his own films, but it confirmed that he was now an outsider in New Hollywood. He scoffed at the pretensions of the younger generation, insisting 'Movies aren't art.' In his memoir, he went further, claiming: 'I didn't make any great movies. There's no such thing as a great movie. In the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is the king. There are no artists. We are businessmen, we're merchants. And there is no art. Agents, lawyers, publicity people...It's all bulls**t. Money, money, money. If you think it's about something else, you're going to be bruised.' For all his frustration, however, Brando wasn't done with cinema just yet.

Back in the Swing

Despite having turned down Donald Cammell's offer to play an American hitman in London in what would become Performance (1970), Brando did come to Britain to play Peter Quint in Michael Winner's The Nightcomers (1971). This was a prequel to the Henry James story that Jack Clayton had filmed as The Innocents (1961). But, while Brando received a BAFTA nomination, it did little to restore his jaded status - unlike his next two projects.

Burt Lancaster had been the first to see the screen merit of Mario Puzo's 1969 bestseller about a Mafia family. But Sergio Leone was Paramount's first choice to direct an adaptation and Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Yates, Richard Brooks, Arthur Penn, Franklin J. Schaffner, Costa-Gavras, and Otto Preminger were sounded out before producer Robert Evans contacted Francis Ford Coppola. Laurence Olivier was the studio's first choice to play Don Vito Corleone, but he preferred to make Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Sleuth (1972) with Michael Caine, instead. Producer Carlo Ponti and Ernest Borgnine were asked before the names of Charles Bronson, John Marley, George C. Scott, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn, and Orson Welles came up.

But it was Puzo who insisted on Brando, even though he was too young for the role and was supposedly in line to top Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971) and play Lewis Medlock in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972). Coppola also needed convincing when Brando auditioned. However, some cotton wool in his cheeks and the slowing of his speech to match his movements meant that Brando got the lead in The Godfather (1972). 'Don Corleone was part of the wave of immigrants who came to this country around the turn of the century,' Brando later reflected, 'and had to swim upstream to survive as best they could. He had the same ambitions for his sons that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his. I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, dignity, refinement.'

He didn't think the film was going to be a major success, however, and sold back his profit percentage for $100,000 because he needed quick cash. The decision cost him $11 million, as The Godfather launched the blockbuster era that still holds sway in Hollywood by becoming the highest-earning film to date with over $250 million worldwide. Having been a model professional during the shoot, Brando was voted Best Actor at the Academy Awards. However, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather (née Maria Louise Cruz) to decline the Oscar because of the depiction of Native Americans in Hollywood films (which was also his reason for refusing Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, 1970). Once more, Brando had Hollywood in the palm of his hand.

Typically, he resisted Joseph L. Mankiewicz's efforts to pair him with Maggie Smith in Macbeth and chose to head to Europe to make Last Tango in Paris (1972) with Bernardo Bertolucci. Charting an encounter between the widowed Paul and the affianced Jeanne (Maria Schneider), the film included graphic, but simulated sex scenes that left each actor feeling violated. 'To this day I can't say what Last Tango in Paris was about,' Brando admitted in his autobiography before going on to complain that it 'required me to do a lot of emotional arm wrestling with myself, and when it was finished, I decided that I wasn't ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie.'

Despite admiring Bertolucci's frankness and the way he shot around the cue cards he had dotted around the set, Brando felt duped and didn't speak to the director for 15 years. In his obituary notice, David Thomson called the film 'the last dissolute, shabby, vile act of the former angel, a role that mined his own past (because he let it), that depended on his own great fascination with sex and its power, as well as his tormented feelings towards women'. The public found the exercise fascinating and Brando banked $3 million from his gross percentage deal. Moreover, the Academy nominated him for Best Actor for the seventh, but last time.

Denied the chance to play Fr Merrin in The Exorcist (1973) by disapproving director William Friedkin, Brando took a break from acting and retreated to Tahiti. When he returned to play outlaw Robert E. Lee Clayton alongside Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's Western, The Missouri Breaks (1976), he proved a law unto himself, as he swapped an Irish brogue for a clipped upper-class British accent and dragged up as a frontier grandmother. He was more disciplined in narrating Raoni, Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha's profile of Indigenous Brazilian activist Raoni Metuktire, and brought an air of dignity to the part of Jor-El in Richard Donner's Superman (1978), for which Brando earned $3.7million for 12 days' work. As he was denied the same percentage, he refused to allow the footage he had filmed for the sequel to be used. However, it was posthumously inserted into Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (1980) and Superman Returns (2006).

As you would expect, both pictures are available from Cinema Paradiso, as are Apocalypse Now Redux and Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, which can be found on Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier. Also up for rental is George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola, and Fax Bahr's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), which outlines how Brando arrived on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic vastly overweight and thoroughly unprepared to play Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, the US Army Special Forces officer who is sought by Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) after turning renegade in Cambodia.

While he was ridiculously well paid for the three weeks he had set aside for his performance, Brando was more generous with his time in order to play George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, in a 10-minute segment in Roots: The Next Generations (1979), which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie after 130 million had watched the episode.

Dark Days to Fade

Since becoming infatuated with Sandy Campbell during the Broadway run of Streetcar, Brando had been bisexual. Consequently, he included Christian Marquand and Richard Pryor among his lovers, as well as Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Katy Jurado, Ursula Andress, and housekeeper Maria Cristina Ruiz. His fierce protection of his privacy resulted in him breaking the jaw of paparazzo Ron Galea outside the theatre where he had been taping a 1973 episode of The Dick Cavett Show, an incident recalled in Leon Gast's documentary, Smash His Camera (2010).

But, as the years passed, Brando became increasingly reluctant to be lured away from Tetiaroa. He actually announced his retirement after being critically mauled for his performance as oil tycoon Adam Steiffel in John G. Avildsen's The Formula (1980). But his detestation of apartheid resulted in Euzhan Palcy persuading him to play lawyer Ian McKenzie in A Dry White Season (1989), which brought him his only Best Supporting Oscar nomination. He was beaten by Denzel Washington for Edward Zwick's Glory, but he should have been nominated instead for his mischievous parody of Vito Corleone as Carmine Sabatini in Andrew Bergman's The Freshman (1990).

However, a family tragedy prompted Brando to withdraw again in May 1990. Eighteen years earlier, Anna Kashfi had reportedly arranged for son Christian to be kidnapped by Mexican thugs during her custody battle with Brando. Clearly a troubled soul, Christian drunkenly shot pregnant half-sister Cheyenne's boyfriend, Dag Drollet, after she had accused him of beating her. Brando had tried to save the 26 year-old before informing the press that 'Misery has come to my house.' Ultimately, Cheyenne confessed that she had been lying and took her own life in April 1995.

Having been considered by Tim Burton for The Penguin in Batman Returns, Brando appeared as Tomás de Torquemada in John Glen's Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (both 1992) and turned down the role of Mr X in Oliver Stone's JFK (1993). New friend Johnny Depp coaxed him into playing Dr Jack Mickler opposite Faye Dunaway in Jeremy Leven's Don Juan DeMarco (1995), and Brando and Depp joined forces again on the unfinished Irish saga, Divine Rapture, which is the subject of Brendan J. Byrne's 2009 documentary, Ballybrando. Brando also showed up in the Depp-directed Neo-Western, The Brave (1997), in which he played a snuff director named McCarthy. However, the reviews were so negative Stateside that the film was never released there (although it's available from Cinema Paradiso, of course), and Brando was denied a last reunion with Depp when Burton cast Christopher Walken as the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow (1999).

In between these assignments, Brando proved that there was life in the old devil yet, as he made life difficult for directors Richard Stanley and John Frankenheimer in the title role of The Island of Dr Moreau (1996). Having narrowly missed out on Worst Supporting Actor for Christopher Columbus, he snared the Golden Raspberry for Worst Actor for a mannered display that was somehow dubbed inferior to his turn as Sven 'The Swede' Sorenson, the prison warden who illegally executes his prisoners, in Yves Simoneau's Free Money (1998). What a shame that Joel and Ethan Coen couldn't have talked him into playing Jeffrey Lebowski in The Big Lebowski, while Tony Kaye had to settle for Stacy Keach as white supremacist author Cameron Alexander in American History X.

Brando played his last role, as Max (the fence for safe-cracker Robert De Niro) in Frank Oz's The Score (2001). True to form, he behaved appallingly, calling the director 'Miss Piggy' (the character he had voiced on The Muppet Show, 1976-81) and only taking direction through De Niro. But he delivered a solid sign-off, as he walked after only a day of playing Father McFeely in Keenan Ivory Wayans's Scary Movie 2 (2001), while his vocal performance as Mrs Sour has spent two decades on the shelf, as Bob Bendetson and Peter Shin's $20 million animated folly, Big Bug Man (2004), remains unreleased.

Cinema Paradiso users can see Brando, however, in Hollywood Bad Boys (2000), Peter Jones and Mark A. Catalena's Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies (2001), Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi (2002), Jim Gable and Michael Hunter's Michael Jackson: The One (2004), Elaina Archer's Ganglands: Bullets Over Hollywood (2005), Barbra Streisand and Richard Jay-Alexander's Barbra Streisand: The Concerts (2006), Susanne Rostock's Sing Your Song (2011), Alex Gibney's Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing (2015), and Raoul Peck's James Baldwin profile, I Am Not Your Negro (2016). Remarkably, they can also listen to extracts from the 200 hours of tapes that Brando had recorded in later life in Stevan Riley's remarkable, Listen to Me Marlon (2015), which makes eerie use of a three-dimensional digital rendering of Brando's head that had been produced by Cyberware in the 1980s.

Blighted by weight issues and Type-2 diabetes, Brando spent much time in his later years at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. He appeared in the music video for 'You Rock My World' (2001) and, according to the urban myth, joined Jacko and Elizabeth Taylor on a car journey out of New York on 11 September 2001. A TV comedy about the journey, featuring Brian Cox as Brando, Joseph Fiennes as Jackson, and Stockard Channing as Taylor, has yet to be aired.

Needing an oxygen mask to breathe, Brando attempted to record the part of Vito Corleone for The Godfather: The Game (2006). However, he only managed one speech, with the remaining lines being delivered by Doug Abrahams: 'You know, it's a lot of foolishness about this Sollozzo business. It's so unfortunate, it's really unnecessary. Gave him my "no" with common courtesy. I told him his business would not interfere with mine. And uh, he wouldn't take it right. I know the Tattaglia family has brought down misfortune on our own heads. Well, that's life. Everybody's got their own tale of sorrow.'

It was a very apposite last line, although Brando continued to collaborate up to the end with Tunisian director Ridha Behi on Brando and Brando, which was released as Always Brando in 2011, with the actor being seen in archive footage. He died on 1 July 2004 at the UCLA Medical Center and his ashes were mixed with those of Wally Cox before being scattered in Death Valley and Tahiti.

In his Guardian obituary, David Thomson wrote, 'there was a mean streak in Brando, a cunning country boy's lust for money and fame and adulation - all the poisons he would turn from in horror once he had tasted them'. The critic continued, 'most of the film work he did was shameful junk, ill-chosen, slapdash and devoid of soul'. He claimed that boredom and sourness had possessed Brando, who 'seldom had the patience, the stamina or the courage to be master of his own fate. Instead, he liked to be seen as the victim of a malign, stupid system, for that came to the aid of his tricky mixture of indolence, disbelief and hypocrisy.'

In many ways, Brando did become the con man he had joked about being. He continued to make films long after he had become disillusioned with cinema and wasted his unique talent on roles that were unworthy of him, as self-loathing, indolence, and indifference set in. Rebellious to the last, his ego was as big as his insecurity and it's noticeable that, outside The Godfather, he never really tested himself against the other great actors of his time.

Thomson concluded, 'He was a tragedy of his own wilful, self-abusive resolve.' Brando was certainly contemptuous of himself, his profession, and those who admired him and, as such belongs in a pantheon alongside the likes of John Barrymore, Orson Welles, Elvis Presley, George Best, and Diego Maradona of those who had it all, but found it too easy and managed to fritter it away.

'Fame has been the bane of my life,' Brando cursed in a desperately sad passage in his memoir. 'I have been forced to live a false life. All the people I know, with the exception of a handful, have been affected by my fame...People don't relate to you as the person you are, but to a myth they believe you are, and the myth is always wrong.'