Method rebel who won Oscars decades apart
Marlon Brando (1924–2004) reshaped screen acting after Stella Adler and Stanislavski training, taking Best Actor Oscars for On the Waterfront (1954) and The Godfather (1972). From Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski to The Wild One’s Johnny, he made rebellion look like a new grammar of film performance.
Born 3 April 1924 in Omaha, only son of a travelling salesman and a stage-actress mother often away, he bonded early with the family housekeeper. Despite playing Italian patriarchs, his ancestry was mostly German, Dutch, English and Irish. At six he moved to Evanston, Illinois, where he met Wally Cox, a friend until Cox died in 1973; his parents split in 1936. Shattuck Military Academy expelled him in 1943 after he broke campus confinement, so he followed his sisters to New York to study under Erwin Piscator and, above all, Stella Adler. Summer stock in Sayville on Long Island got him fired and then rediscovered, and in 1945 he toured opposite Tallulah Bankhead in The Eagle Has Two Heads to mixed reviews. Broadway arrived with I Remember Mama (1944); Theater World Awards followed for Candida and Truckline Cafe (1946). Film debut as a wounded G.I. in The Men (1950) preceded the Kowalski explosion in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), an Oscar-nominated turn that announced a new American intensity.
Competitive Oscars crowned Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront and Vito Corleone in The Godfather; further nominations included Zapata and other landmarks. Guys and Dolls, The Young Lions, Burn!, and later uneven returns filled a restless filmography. On television he won a Primetime Emmy for Roots: The Next Generations (1979), then stepped away for nine years before drifting back with mixed commercial luck.
Accolades piled up: two Oscars, two Golden Globes, three BAFTAs, a Cannes award, and that Emmy. He died 1 July 2004, still the reference point for actors who mumble, smash, and invent behaviour instead of declaiming it. The generation-gap emblem of The Wild One never quite left the cultural rear-view mirror.
Source: Marlon Brando
