Biography of Marlon Brando :- Actor of American cinema, considered one of the majors myths of the history of the cinema.
Marlon Brando was the third of the children of the marriage formed by Dorothy Pennebaker, of Irish blood, and Marlon Brando, descendant of French that Americanized its original surname, “Brandeau”.
Biography of Marlon Brando
- Born:- 3 April 1924, Omaha, Nebraska, United States
- Died:- 1 July 2004, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, California, United States
- Height:- 1.75 m
- Children:- Christian Brando, Cheyenne Brando
His father, a very strong man belonging to the Episcopalian Church, was a representative of a chemical factory, so, according to his destiny, the family changed residence several times (Illinois, California, Minnesota) before To establish himself definitively in a farm of Libertyville, Illinois, in 1937.
See Also: Biography of George Clooney
Of his mother, amateur artist and main impeller of a theater group of Omaha by which, in the late twenties, passed some still unknown Dorothy McGuire and Henry Fonda, inherited , Both he and his sisters, Joselyn and Frances, their attraction to the scene.
The notorious incompatibility of marriage resulted, after a short time, in a constant battle that in the middle of the dry law led the woman to alcoholism and the children to emancipate themselves from very young.
Brando learned of the death of his mother, in 1954, on a set of filming. His father, who soon remarried, died in 1965.
Rebel from childhood, young Bud (his family nickname) entered the Shattuck Military Academy in Fairbult, Minnesota, at sixteen years of age, when, far from being “straightened out,” he was expelled two years later for insubordination.
Forced to work at any time, he was a bricklayer and excavator driver while his sisters became independent and left for New York to try his luck at the theater.
At the beginning of 1943 he went to live with his sister Joselyn with the same objective, although in order to make a living he had to string together a succession of occasional jobs (seller of sodas, dishwashers, buttons, lift attendant in a department store) while waiting for his opportunity.
The Birth of a Myth
A recommendation led him to Erwin Piscator, director of the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, the embryo of the Actor’s Studio.
There she attended the classes of Stella Alder, who was highly esteemed to have been a student in Moscow of Konstantin Stanislawski, whose techniques she applied.
A dozen works between 1944 and 1947 (Molière, Shakespeare, Ben Hetch, Cocteau, Bernard Shaw …) boosted his talent, and two sentences were enough to convince Tennessee Williams that he was before the ideal interpreter to incarnate for the first time Turn to Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire . With the pleasure of the playwright and the direction of Elia Kazan, Brando was a never-surpassed Kowalski, and overnight he got all Broadway to talk about him.
The resounding success of the montage propitiated his cinematographic version. And the actor, who had already made his debut in Men (1950), by Fred Zinnemann, was able to bring to the screen all the strength and nuances with which he had endowed his character in the scene, although his power of seduction multiplied.
With A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Marlon Brando not only acquired an immediate worldwide fame: with it was born the myth. An icon that imitated his contemporaries and that half a century later has not been extinguished.
As recorded in his memoirs, The songs that my mother taught me , he was not then aware of the scope of his image or the effect of his rebellion, which without claiming it secured in other titles, such as Wild! (1954) by László Benedek, or Sidney Lumet’s Serpent Skin (1959).
Another notable film of those years was The Dance of the Damned (1958), which allowed Brando to show his interpretive versatility by embodying the role of a captain of the German Wehrmacht, to which he gave a more human character, which differed from the prevailing In the war films of the time.
In the Brando of that time prevailed, above any other consideration, his prestige as an actor. In six years of career he had been an Oscar nominee five times, and although he could have won for Viva Zapata! (1952), Kazan, or Julius Caesar (1953), Joseph L. Mankiewicz, he obtained by The Waterfront (1954), in which he played the contradictory Terry Malloy (former boxer who roams the docks of New York), an alter ego of the film’s director, Kazan, haunted by the phantom of the delation after having contributed to the sinister witch-hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy denouncing his comrades.
The actor hesitated long before accepting his role in this kind of movie-expiation, but owed much to Kazan.
Controversial Actor
In reality, Brando, who incarnated nonconformity in front of other faint-hearted Hollywood stars, believed that he was working against the star system, behind the back of the industry, and that his character suited the great dream factory: Best seller of its products.
It is true that he rejected many offers of Hollywood, but more by saturation than by ideology. This way, it is better understood his work in titles of diverse genre and unequal quality that, besides proving its versatility, did not contribute to increase its prestige.
This was already happening in the 1950s, when it was at the summit, and, over time, became increasingly apparent. It can be said that this first stage was closed with his only work as a director.
The impenetrable face (1961), a twilight western that marked the guidelines that have since governed the genre, but which at the time was not rightly valued.
A decade later, rescued from the middle by Bertolucci and Coppola, who with El Padrino brought him to a new Oscar – picked up on his behalf by a false Sioux Indian as a protest for the treatment of Native Americans -, in the reborn Brando could more Greed, and Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), with a salary of $ 14 million, inaugurated his work manifestly mercenary and forgettable that characterized the last stage of his career. His biographers say he acted thus bound by debts.
In fact, its economy was damaged by its investments in Tahiti (owned Teti’aroa atoll since 1966) and by the sequels and obligations that its exotic, dilated and dramatic sentimental history provided (the false Hindu Anna Kashfi – in fact Joanna O ‘Callaghan, Welsh’, with whom he litigated for years custody of his first son, Christian, who in 1990 was convicted of the murder of his sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend , who in turn committed suicide in 1995 – Mexican Movita Castaneda.
The Tahitian Tarita Teriipia and, between 1988 and 2001, her Guatemalan assistant María Cristhina Ruiz, mother of her last three children).
Nevertheless, shortly after his death the testament was made public in which he left a patrimony of about 22 million dollars and recognized ten of his children had of all their relations. Of them, the elders divided their ashes according to the will of the actor, in his island of Tahiti and in California, in the Valley of the Death.
