Brando achieved greatness on screen

By Andy Seiler
USA Today

Marlon Brando was hired by the director of "The Godfather" against the studio's wishes. Advertiser library photo

He was Marlon Brando, the 80-year-old Oscar-winning actor who became almost as famous for his bizarre behavior and gluttonous appetites as for the groundbreaking acting that made him an international icon. He died Thursday at the UCLA Medical Center, attorney David J. Seeley said Friday. The cause of death was lung failure, Seeley said, noting the actor "was a very private man."

In the 1950s, the handsome, hypnotic actor with the muscular build and the full lips ruled Hollywood, nominated for the best actor Oscar five times between 1952 and 1958. (He won for "On the Waterfront.") Director Elia Kazan called the brooding, lusty star the best actor in the world. Yet by the end of his life, Brando was a portly punch line, a sad symbol of decay and self-parody, a titanic target for all those who wished to sling arrows at squandered talent and obese obsolescence.

"The only reason I'm here is because I don't yet have the moral strength to turn down the money," Brando said when he first came to Hollywood to play a paraplegic war veteran in "The Men" (although to prepare, he spent a month in a military hospital, watching). He never did find that strength. Money was often his master.

Brando, who often derided acting as a neurotic joke of a profession, earned a record-breaking $3.7 million for a brief appearance in "Superman" (1978), which flew high at the box office, and $5 million for 10 minutes of footage in "Christopher Columbus —The Discovery" (1992), which quickly sank. He was even paid $5 million for his 1994 book "Songs My Mother Taught Me," which launched what some said was a new genre: the tell-nothing autobiography.

Unique technique

Brando played opposite Robert De Niro and Edward Norton in 2001's "The Score." Before production began, De Niro, a lifelong Brando acolyte, told USA Today that he couldn't wait to watch Brando in action, and felt he got a bad rap for refusing to learn his lines, instead delivering them from cues recited in a hidden earphone. "There's nothing wrong with that kind of technique," De Niro said. "It's more spontaneous."

"Certainly, he's eccentric," British actor David Thewlis said of Brando after appearing with him in the third movie version of "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996). "It's no secret that he's as mad as a hatter."

Brando's life was as strange as anything in Alice's Wonderland. Brando's oldest son killed the lover of Brando's pregnant daughter. His daughter committed suicide. He reportedly sought Irish citizenship in 1995 because, he said, Tahitian gangsters had placed a contract on his life (he owned a financially ruinous atoll in Tahiti).

When he won an Oscar for "The Godfather," he sent a supposed American Indian (in full indigenous dress) to pick up the statue he refused to accept to protest "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry." She turned out later to be an impostor.

After complaining to Larry King that Hollywood is "run by Jews" who depicted other minorities unflatteringly, he had to apologize for the remark. (He also famously kissed King on the lips.)

Before it was even released, he ridiculed the movie "The Freshman" (1990) as the biggest turkey of all time. He apologized for that, too, and then got good reviews for parodying his "Godfather" persona in the film, though some saw it as self-desecration.

In his last years, Brando lived as a recluse in a Los Angeles compound.

And yet he is an icon who will live for generations. He didn't invent "method acting" (Stanislavsky did), but he made the term familiar around the world, revolutionizing the actor's art with his natural, tortured and spontaneous early performances.

"He gave us our freedom," an admiring Jack Nicholson once said.

A famous black-and-white poster of Brando as a motorcycle gang leader in 1954's controversial "The Wild One" ("What are you rebelling against?" "What have you got?") hangs on walls around the globe. He made catchphrases of "an offer he couldn't refuse," "I coulda been a contenda" and the tortured cry of "Stella!"

Son of alcoholics

Born in 1924, the son of alcoholics (his father sold animal feed and limestone, his actress mother co-founded the Omaha Community Playhouse in Nebraska), "Bud" Brando became an actor in New York (rooming with actor comedian Wally Cox) after being expelled from military school.

He made his professional stage debut in the 1944 hit "I Remember Mama" but made theatrical history with his brutish yet complex 1947 performance in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," which he later recaptured on film.

As Brando added to his screen credits "Viva Zapata!" "Julius Caesar," "The Wild One," and "On the Waterfront," he be- came a symbol for rebellion against the stuffy American conformity of the 1950s and an idol and role model for actors everywhere.

"He's the most keenly aware, the most empathetical human being alive," legendary acting teacher Stella Adler told Brando biographer Richard Schickel. "He just knows. ... If you left the room, he could be you."

But by the 1960s, he couldn't seem to be much of anybody, appearing in one ludicrous bomb after another. And he couldn't seem to care, either. "I get excited about something, but it never lasts longer than seven minutes," he said at the time. "Seven minutes exactly. That's my limit."

Yet though he was considered washed up by many in the '60s, he won his second and final Oscar for his comeback performance as "The Godfather" (1972), as famous as any role he ever took on.

Director Francis Ford Coppola had hired him against Paramount's wishes. Brando received eight Oscar nominations altogether, the last for supporting actor in 1989's "A Dry White Season."