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Marlon Brando: Streetcar Named Desire
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Since bellowing and blustering his way into the spotlight with A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando has been one of the most revered performers in the world. He was ... incredibly reclusive, having shied away from the spotlight for decades. Marlon Brando, written by Brando's close friend George Englund, offers an intimate glimpse into the life and death of the amazing theatrical legend and a portrait of the friendship the two men shared.
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Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was an American actor who brought the techniques of method acting to prominence in the films A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. His acting style, combined with his public persona as an outsider uninterested in the Hollywood of the early 1950s, had a profound effect on a generation of actors, including James Dean and Paul Newman, and later stars, including Robert De Niro.
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Before James Dean (1931–1955), Marlon Brando popularized the jeans-and-T-shirt look, as a movie idol during the early 1950s. Hollywood was impressed with Brando, and in 1950 he made his motion picture debut as a severely injured war veteran in The Men. He went on to play Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. The movie was both a popular and a critical success.
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From his 1947 stage appearance in A Streetcar Named Desire until his death last year, Marlon Brando fought his own fame, with a pathological hatred of praise, an identification with the dispossessed, and a retreat to Tahiti. Talking to other Brando intimates, the screenwriter of On the Waterfront creates a private portrait of Hollywood's tormented king.
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F[R]om the moment Brando first trod the boards in Truckline Cafe, he was the focal point and elicited raves for his five-minute bit. When Elia "Gadge" Kazan, who had seen Brando in Truckline, suggested to Tennessee Williams that Brando play Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and sent Brando to Connecticut to meet the playwright, it changed the entire concept of the play. Originally, Stanley was to have been considerably older and more of a brute but when Tennessee met Brando, he phoned Kazan "... in a voice near hysteria. Brando had overwhelmed him," said Kazan in his autobiography, A Life.
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Brando changed modern acting by popularizing "the Method," a technique which emphasized emotional truth and naturalistic style. Brando was a smash hit on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947; in the early 1950s he was nominated in four consecutive years for best actor Oscars, winning once for the 1954 film On the Waterfront. (He was ... nominated as Marc Antony in 1953's Julius Caesar, for playing Emiliano Zapata in 1952's Viva Zapata!, and for the 1951 film version of Streetcar.) In the 1970s Brando became hot all over again, winning a second Oscar for playing Mafia kingpin Don Corleone in The Godfather. In later years Brando became famous for his reclusiveness and Orson Welles-like girth. His last feature film was the 2001 heist thriller The Score, in which he was paired with Method-trained actors from two younger generations: Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton.
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Streetcar Named Desire