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 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all 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 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as 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. In this article, we will talk about Marlon Brando's Biography including Net Worth, Age, Birthday, Height, Weight, Family, Children etc.
Marlon Brando Biography
Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." 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 1943, following 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 Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. 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! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."
Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.
Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. 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 The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. 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 "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.
During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. 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 café set. 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.
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 "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. 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 "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. 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 "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. 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 A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. 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 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.
It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized 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 McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.
In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, 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 VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.
Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.
Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.
Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.
While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.
Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Queimada (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.
The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.
Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.
Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Queimada (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.
Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.
Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.
Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.
Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.
After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.
After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.
Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.
Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.
Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.
To know his complete profile, check the following table.
| Name | : | Marlon Brando |
| Birth Name/Full Name | : | Marlon Brando Jr. |
| Nickname (s) | : | Bud, Mr Mumbles |
| Other Name (s) | : | - |
| Gender | : | Male |
| Date of Birth | : | April 03, 1924 |
| Birthplace | : | Omaha, Nebraska, USA |
| Citizenship | : | American |
| Height | : | 1.75 m |
| Weight | : | - kg |
| Profession (s) | : | Actor , Director , Cinematographer |
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Marlon Brando Age in 2023 and Birthday Info
In this section, we will add Marlon Brando's birthday-related information. Marlon Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, USA on April 03, 1924.He died on in Westwood, Los Angeles, California, USA (pulmonary fibrosis). Check the below table for more information.
| Date of Birth | : | April 03, 1924 |
| Birth Place | : | Omaha, Nebraska, USA |
| Country | : | United States |
| Date of Death | : | 2004-7-1 |
| Death Place | : | Westwood, Los Angeles, California, USA (pulmonary fibrosis) |
| Aged | : | 80 years |
| Next Birthday | : | 03 April, 2023 |
| Horoscope(Zodic Sign) | : | Aries |
Marlon Brando Height and Weight
Now we are going to add Marlon Brando's Height (In Meter, Centi Meter, and Feet-Inches) and Weight (In Kilogram and Pounds). As weight changes frequently, we may not have the current weight of Marlon Brando. The height of Marlon Brando is 1.75 m. Check the below table to see in more units.
| Height in Meter | : | 1.75 m. |
| Height in Centimeter | : | 175 cm. |
| Height in Feet-inches | : | 5'9" |
| Weight in Kilogram | : | - kg |
| Weight in Pounds | : | - lb |
Marlon Brando Family (Spouse, Children, Parents, Siblings, Relatives)
In this section, we will add Marlon Brando's complete family information including his martial status, husbandorwife, children, parents, relatives, and siblings.
| Marital Status | : | Married |
| Spouse (s) | : | Tarita (10 August 1962 - 14 July 1972) (divorced) (2 children) , Movita (4 June 1960 - 1962) (divorced) (2 children) , Anna Kashfi (11 October 1957 - 22 April 1959) (divorced) (1 child) |
| Children (s) | : | Christian Brando , Miko C. Brando , Brando Kotlinzky, Rebecca , Teihotu Brando , Brando, Stefano , Brando, Tarita Cheyenne , Brando, Ninna Priscilla , Brando, Myles Jonathan , Brando, Timothy Gahan , Brando-Corval, Petra (adopted child) , Brando, Maimiti (adopted child) , Brando, Raiatua (adopted child) |
| Parents (Father and Mother) | : | Brando Sr., Marlon , Brando (Pennebaker), Dorothy Julia |
| Relatives | : | Brando, Frannie (sibling) , Jocelyn Brando (sibling) |
Marlon Brando Social Accounts (Facebbok, Instagram, Twitter, Website)
In this section, we will add Marlon Brando's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and personal website.
| : | Marlon Brando Facebook | |
| : | Marlon Brando Instagram | |
| : | Marlon Brando Twitter | |
| Personal Website | : | Marlon Brando Webiste |
Marlon Brando Net Worth in 2023
Are you curious to know what was the net worth of Marlon Brando at time when he died. The net worth of Marlon Brando was $100 million. We do not guarantee the net worth of Marlon Brando is the exact amount. This is based on several sources on the internet.
Marlon Brando Facts and Trivia
Here is the list of top facts about Marlon Brando.
- Ranked #13 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. [October 1997]
- He balked at the prospect of Burt Reynolds in the role of Santino Corleone in The Godfather (1972).
- Eldest son Christian Brando was arrested for murdering his half-sister's boyfriend Dag Drollet in 1990. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 1991 and released in January 1996.
- Worked as a department store elevator operator before he became famous. He quit after four days due to his embarrassment in having to call out the lingerie floor.
- Was roommates with childhood friend Wally Cox during his theatrical training in New York City. The two remained lifelong friends, and Brando took Cox's sudden death from a heart attack at age 48 extremely hard.
- Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#14) (1995).
- Two years before Brando declined his Oscar for Best Actor in The Godfather (1972), he had applied to the Academy to replace the one he had won for On the Waterfront (1954), which had been stolen. Prior to its theft, Brando had been using the Oscar as a doorstop.
- Owned a private island off the Pacific coast, the Polynesian atoll known as Tetiaroa, from 1966 until his death in 2004.
- Native of Omaha, Nebraska. His mother once gave stage lessons to Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native.
- Lived on infamous "Bad Boy Drive" (Muholland Drive in Beverly Hills, California), which received its nickname because its residents were famous "bad boy" actors Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Brando.
- Was the youngest of three children of Marlon Brando Sr. and Dorothy Pennebaker Brando.
- His son Miko C. Brando was once a bodyguard for Michael Jackson. Jackson and Brando remained good friends thereafter.
- Born to alcoholic parents, Brando was left alone much of the time as a child.
- While filming The Score (2001), he refused to be on the set at the same time as director Frank Oz, referring to the former "Muppets" director as "Miss Piggy".
- Younger brother of actress Jocelyn Brando, who appeared with him in The Ugly American (1963) and The Chase (1966).
- Daughter Cheyenne committed suicide in 1995, aged 25.
- In April 2002, a woman filed a $100-million palimony lawsuit in California against Brando, claiming he fathered her three children during a 14-year romantic relationship. Maria Cristina Ruiz, 43, filed the breach-of-contract suit, demanding damages and living expenses. The lawsuit was settled in April 2003.
- Ranked #12 in Entertainment Weekly's "Top 100 Entertainers" of all time (2000).
- Received more money for his short appearance as Jor-El in Superman (1978) than Christopher Reeve did in the title role. Brando later sued for a percentage of the film's profits.
- He used cue cards in many of his movies because he refused to memorize his lines. His lines were written on the diaper of the baby, "Kal-El", in Superman (1978).
- One of the innovators of the Method acting technique in American film.
- Was mentioned in La dolce vita (1960) in a discussion about salary paid to film stars.
- Adopted child: Petra Barrett Brando, whose biological father is author James Clavell and biological mother is Caroline Barrett.
- Said that the only reason he continued to make movies was in order to raise the money to produce what he said would be the "definitive" film about Native Americans. The film was never made.
- Expelled from high school for riding a motorcycle through the halls.
- His signature was considered so valuable to collectors, that many personal checks he wrote were never cashed because his signature was usually worth more than the amount on the check.
- Studied at the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
- Mentioned in The Kinks' song "Sunny Afternoon," Neil Young's song "Pocahontas," David Bowie's song "China Girl," Bruce Springsteen's song "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City," Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire," Kirsty MacColl's song "Terry," and Marcella Detroit's song "Boy".
- Appeared on the front sleeve of The Beatles' classic album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as Johnny in The Wild One (1953).
- Brando's first wife was Anna Kashfi, who bore him a son whom they named Christian. His second wife was Movita Castenada, who played the Tahitian love interest of Lt. Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). His third wife was Tarita Teriipia, who played the Tahitian love interest of Lt. Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).
- He had English, Dutch, French, German, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry. He was descended from Johann Wilhelm Brandau (b. 1670), who was a German immigrant. The surname was eventually changed to "Brando." One of Marlon's maternal great-grandfathers, Myles Joseph Gahan, emigrated to the United States from Dublin, Ireland.
- Helped out a great deal of minorities in America, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native American Indians.
- He reputedly suggested that his cameo role as Jor-El in Superman (1978) be done by him in voice-over only, with the character's image onscreen being a glowing, levitating green bagel. Unsure if Brando was joking or not, the film's producers formally rejected the suggestion.
- Russell Crowe wrote and sang a song about him called "I Wanna Be Marlon Brando".
- He was offered a chance to reprise his role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974) and Jor El in Superman II (1980), but he turned them both down due to his own credo that once he finished a role, he put it away and moved on. He turned down both films despite being offered three times more money than any of his co-stars.
- Is one of the many movie stars mentioned in Madonna's song "Vogue".
- Film critic Roger Ebert praised Brando as "the Greatest Actor in the World".
- Empire magazine profiled him as part of their "Greatest Living Actors" series. The issue containing this feature was published a week before his death.
- He was voted the 7th "Greatest Movie Star" of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
- Biographer Peter Manso said that at the time of production of flops such as The Appaloosa (1966), Brando had turned down the leading role of a Hamlet production in England, with Laurence Olivier.
- Mentioned in the song "The Ballad of Michael Valentine" by The Killers, the song "American Horse" by The Cult, and the song "Eyeless" by the heavy metal band Slipknot.
- During an acting class, when the students were told to act out "a chicken hearing an air-raid siren", most of the students clucked and flapped their arms in a panic, while Brando stood stock-still, staring up at the ceiling. When asked to explain himself, Brando replied, "I'm a chicken - I don't know what an air-raid siren is.".
- Received top billing in nearly every film he appeared in, even if not cast in the lead role.
- Was offered $2 million for four days work to appear as a priest in Scary Movie 2 (2001) but had to withdraw when he was hospitalized with pneumonia in April 2001. Consequently, the role was played by James Woods.
- In his book "The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando", George Englund relates how Brando told him a couple of years before his death that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences offered him a Lifetime Achievement Oscar on the condition that he attend the ceremony to personally accept the award. Brando refused, believing that the offer should not be conditional, and that the condition that he appear on the televised ceremony showed that the Academy was not primarily focused on honoring artistic excellence.
- He was reportedly interested in making a film of Rolf Hochhuth's controversial play "The Deputy", an indictment of the alleged silence of Pope Pius XII (God's "Deputy" on Earth) over the Nazi persecution of the Jews during World War II. The film was never made.
- He attended a staging of Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical "Long Day's Journey Into Night" with an eye towards starring in a proposed film of the play. The play deals with the drug addiction of Mary Tyrone, modeled after O'Neil's own mother, which, along with her husband's miserliness and her oldest son's alcoholism, has blighted her youngest son's life. When asked his opinion of the play, Brando, whose mother was an alcoholic and had died relatively young in 1954, replied, "Lousy". Jason Robards, who originated the role of older son James Tyrone, Jr. in the original Broadway production in 1956, subsequently appeared in Sidney Lumet's 1962 movie.
- He was reportedly once interested in playing Pablo Picasso on film and was trying to reduce weight on a banana diet. The film was never made.
- In his autobiography, he said that he was physically attracted to Vivien Leigh during the making of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). However, he could not bring himself to seduce her, as he found her husband, Laurence Olivier, to be such a "nice guy".
- According to friend George Englund in his book "The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando", he testified at the manslaughter trial of his son Christian Brando that his mother and father and one of his two sisters had been alcoholics.
- Paramount studio brass wanted him to appear as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (1974), but he wanted $4 million, an unheard-of salary at the time.
- Director Francis Ford Coppola wanted Brando to appear as Preston Tucker Jr. in his biopic of the maverick automotive executive he planned to make after he completed The Godfather Part II (1974). Brando was not interested but did appear in Apocalypse Now (1979), the film Coppola actually did make after finishing The Godfather (1972) sequel. When Coppola finally got around to making the film Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), he cast Jeff Bridges in the role.
- According to co-producer Fred Roos, Brando was scheduled to make a cameo appearance in The Godfather Part II (1974), specifically in the flashback at the film's ending in which Vito Corleone comes back to his home and is greeted with a surprise birthday party. In fact, he was expected the day of shooting but did not show up due to a salary dispute. According to Francis Ford Coppola, he had not been paid for The Godfather (1972) and thus would not appear in the sequel.
- Was a huge fan of Afro-Caribbean music, and changed from being a strict drummer to the congas after becoming enthralled by the music in New York City in the 1940s.
- Took possession of friend Wally Cox's ashes from his widow in order to scatter them at sea but actually kept them hidden in a closet at his house. In his autobiography, Brando said he frequently talked to Cox. The Los Angeles Times on September 22, 2004 quoted Brando's son, Miko, to the effect that both his father's and Cox's ashes were scattered at the same time in Death Valley, California in a ceremony following Brando's death.
- Asked The Godfather (1972) co-star James Caan what he would want if his wishes came true. When Caan answered that he would like to be in love, Brando answered, "Me too. But don't tell my wife.".
- Was scheduled to appear in the David Lean-directed "Nostromo" (1991), but when Lean died, the production came to a halt. Thus, the world missed the last of three chances to see one of the world's greatest actors work with one of the world's greatest directors. Producer Sam Spiegel, who had won an Oscar for On the Waterfront (1954), offered Brando the title role in Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which he turned down, saying he did not want to ride camels in the desert for two years. Brando was Lean's first choice for the male lead in Ryan's Daughter (1970), but Brando, who at that time was considered box office poison by movie studios, never was offered the role.
- Brando tried to join the Army during World War II but was rejected due to a knee injury he had sustained while playing football at Shattuck Military Academy. After he made The Men (1950), the Korean War broke out, and he was ordered by the draft board to report for a physical prior to induction. As his knee was better due to an operation, he initially was reclassified from 4-F to 1-A, but the military again rejected him, this time for mental problems, as he was under psychoanalysis.
- The story about his mother his character Paul tells Jeanne in Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972), about how she taught him to appreciate nature, which he illustrates with his reminiscence of his dog Dutchy hunting rabbits in a mustard field, is real, based on his own recollections of his past.
- His best friend was Wally Cox, whom he had known as a child and then met again when both were aspiring actors in New York during the 1940s. According to Brando's autobiography, there was not a day that went by when he did not think of Wally. So close did he feel to Cox, he even kept the pajamas he died in.
- The day when Marlon Brando was born was Thursday.
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Conclusion
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