Marlon Brando - Biography - IMDb. Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1. Great stories never grow old! Chosen by children’s librarians at The New York Public Library, these 100 inspiring tales have thrilled generations of children and. All the wonders of the world await you through the shared resources, services, and programs of the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library, a core community service. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 5. 0 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' Endstation Sehnsucht (1. Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1. American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1. Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1. Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did. Marlon Brando, Jr. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named . His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then- unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1. Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high- school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation. Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play- act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Der letzte Tango in Paris (1. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar- winning co- star in Viva Zapata (1. Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, . Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the . As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen- test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then- standard seven- year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's Die M. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on- screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in . Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play . For the scene where Brando's character re- enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage- center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the caf. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real- life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor. Visit one of our stunning parks, gardens, and beaches. Rain or shine, our city's physical splendour can inspire and soothe you. No matter what background we find in any particular stock-bird, it is a known fact that year after year, this loft produces truly magnificent pigeons; all have. Ceratocystis fimbriata. The following information was compiled for the CABI Crop Protection Compendium, CABI Publishing. The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out- of- town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences. For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing . Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents. Brando didn't like the term . Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography . The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography . Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience. Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method. After Endstation Sehnsucht (1. Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award- nominated performances - in Viva Zapata (1. Julius Caesar (1. Kazan's Die Faust im Nacken (1. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel- without- a- cause Johnny in Der Wilde (1. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co- star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 2. Brando to join his repertory company. It was this period of 1. American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve Mc. Queen. After Brando, every up- and- coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the . Though he had a couple of failures, like Desir. Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well- reviewed Der Besessene (1. Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along. Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive Vista. Vision film at 5. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut.
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