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Marlon Brando: Academy Award
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Marlon Brando's big break came with the Broadway play, A Streecar Named Desire. Brando won rave reviews as the brutish Stanley Kowalski and reprised the role again in Elia Kazan's film version. Brando was praised for his realistic and natural acting. He would set the benchmark for every American actor who followed. Streetcar would give Marlon Brando the first of his eight Academy Award nominations.
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Marlon Brando is widely known for his interest in Native Americans. A widely known expression of this interest was when he stayed away from Academy Award ceremony at which he was presented an Oscar for Best Actor for his role in The Godfather. Instead of going himself, Brando sent an actress dressed as a Native American woman to accept the award on his behalf. The woman was to deliver a political speech written by Brando about the plight of Native Americans, but Howard Koch, the producer of the show, intercepted her and confiscated the printed speech, leaving the woman to ad lib a few words conveying Brando's ideas on the subject. It was a rather scandalous and embarrassing event at the time, but Brando could care less, and today Brando's bizarre method for accepting that Oscar is one of Hollywood's favorite anecdotes about the iconoclastic actors. In his autobiography, Brando spends two chapters (pages 373-402) discussing his thoughts about Native Americans and recounting some of his experiences with them.
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Before James Dean, Marlon Brando popularized the jeans-and-T-shirt look, with and without leather jacket, as a movie idol during the early 1950s. The theatrically trained actor began to turn away from his youth-oriented persona with such movie roles as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar (1953). After winning an Academy Award for Best Actor for On the Waterfront (1954), he portrayed a wide variety of characters on-screen, garnering popular acclaim and critical consensus as one of the greatest cinema actors of the late twentieth century.
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Marlon Brando began his career on the Broadway stage in 1944, attaining stardom for his role as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire. He later repeated the part for the screen version of the classic play. Brando won his first Academy Award for best actor for his role in On the Waterfront, and captured a second Oscar for his role as "the Godfather" in the eponymous film.
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Brando played a variety of different characters over the next several years. In his next movie, Viva Zapata! (1952), he played Emiliano Zapata, who rose from being a peasant (a poor farmer) to becoming the president of Mexico. He was Marc Antony in the film version of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) Julius Caesar (1953). He played a motorcyclegang leader in The Wild One (1954), portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) in Désirée (1954), and sang and danced as Sky Masterson in the musical comedy Guys and Dolls (1955). Brando won his first Academy Award in 1954 for his role in On the Water-front, a hard-hitting look at New York City labor unions (a workers' group organized to help workers receive fair wages).
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Brando made his directorial debut with One-Eyed Jacks (1961), an ambitious if confused anti-Western. His reputation began to suffer following release of the bloated 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (with Brando in the Clark Gable role of Fletcher Christian), which came in grotesquely over budget, thanks in part to his capricious penchant for "inspired" improvisation and painstaking attempts to achieve the "perfect mood." The actor's few forays in screen comedy, including Bedtime Story (1964) and Charlie Chaplin's ill-fated A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), nearly sank his career; indeed, by the end of the decade, Brando was nearly a forgotten figure. Such odd and unusual films as Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and Burn! (1969) put Brando outside the mainstream-to the extent that he had to test for the role of mob boss Vito Corleone. That remarkable performance in The Godfather (1972) not only netted Brando his second Oscar, but restored the luster to his tarnished reputation. Brando amplified his renewed notoriety by sending a young woman in Indian costume to refuse the award, based on the actor's outrage over the plight of Native Americans.
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