The Full Biography
Marlon Brando. Actor. The Omaha boy who tore a T-shirt into a new weather for American acting, then spent a long second life arguing with the town that had crowned him.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a dockworker in the back of a car, or a don in a darkened study, or a torn undershirt on a New Orleans landing. The year might be 1954, or 1972, or 1951. The line, more often than not, is the one from On the Waterfront: a small man telling his brother he could have been a contender. That sentence belongs to the picture. It is not a memoir. What the still cannot show is Marlon Brando Jr. of Omaha, a military-school expulsion, Stella Adler’s classroom, a Broadway shock in 1947, two Oscars, a refusal that put a Native woman on the Academy’s stage, an atoll in the South Pacific, and a death in Los Angeles at eighty that the method never quite explained.
He was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando Sr., a salesman, and Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, who had wanted the stage and drank when the house would not give it to her. A sister, Jocelyn, became an actress. Another sister, Frances, painted. The household moved toward Illinois — Evanston, then Libertyville — and the boy learned early that feeling was not a decoration. He was sent to Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. The school expelled him. The first pressure was a gifted, ungovernable son in a house that could not hold its own weather. In 1943 he went to New York. He studied with Stella Adler at the Dramatic Workshop. The Actors Studio was the climate around that work, not a membership card that explains the voice. Adler taught him that the body already knew what the line was pretending to invent.
The door is December 1947. Elia Kazan staged Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Jessica Tandy was Blanche. Brando was Stanley Kowalski, in a torn shirt, with a walk that made the orchestra seats lean forward. Broadway had seen leading men. It had not seen this. In 1950 he made his first film, The Men, as a paralyzed veteran. In 1951 he brought Kowalski to the screen for Kazan, opposite Vivien Leigh. The film is still the civics lesson in what a close-up can do when the actor refuses to decorate it.
Viva Zapata! and Julius Caesar proved he could carry history without the old declamation. The Wild One (1953) put him on a motorcycle and gave a generation a face for refusal. Then On the Waterfront (1954), again for Kazan. Terry Malloy, a washed-up fighter on the Hoboken docks, sits in a car with his brother and says he could have been a contender. The Academy named him Best Actor. The line is the picture, not a confession he wrote for a magazine.
He directed one film, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a Western he finished after Stanley Kubrick left. Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) took him to Tahiti and left him with an island he would buy: Tetiaroa, north of Papeete, a private atoll that became the other house. Guys and Dolls (1955) asked him to sing Sky Masterson and proved he would take a musical if the part had a walk. The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956). Sayonara (1957) brought another nomination, an Army major in Japan, a picture the town liked more than the decades have. The Young Lions (1958) put him in a blond German officer opposite Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin. The Fugitive Kind (1960), from Williams again, opposite Anna Magnani. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), for John Huston, opposite Elizabeth Taylor, is the kind of risk the middle years still had in them. Burn! (1969), for Gillo Pontecorvo, is a political Western the box office ignored. The middle years were uneven in the way a man is uneven when he has already changed the job and does not know what the job is for. He marched. He stood with the civil-rights work of the 1960s. He treated Hollywood’s Indian as a lie that needed a public correction. The town filed him as difficult. The difficulty was the point.
The return is 1972. Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Cotton in the cheeks. A voice like paper being folded. A second Academy Award. On March 27, 1973, he did not come to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. He sent Sacheen Littlefeather, in Apache dress, to refuse the statue. She named Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans and the occupation then underway at Wounded Knee. The room booed and clapped in the same breath. The refusal is in the file. So is the reason. A complete life does not keep the don and throw away the woman on the stage.
The same year, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris put him opposite Maria Schneider. One scene, involving butter, was a choice Brando and Bertolucci made without fully informing Schneider of what they would do. She said so, years after, with a clarity the premiere did not give her. They described it as a decision they had made. The file holds that. It does not tour it. The picture is not erased by the sentence, and the sentence is not erased by the picture.
Apocalypse Now (1979) put him in the jungle as Colonel Kurtz, shaved, heavy, quoting Eliot in a dark that Coppola had already spent a war trying to light. Superman (1978) paid him as Jor-El: a few days, a large check, a father from Krypton who is also a man taking the town’s money. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) is the late chaos the profiles prefer — white makeup, a production that came apart, a star who would no longer pretend the set was a church. Tetiaroa remained. The Mulholland house remained. The work, by then, was intermittent and expensive.
An actor's a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, ain't listening.Marlon Brando
That is the turn, and it is easy to file as arrogance. The turn is the 1973 refusal. A man who had already rewritten the American close-up used the biggest night in the trade to talk about a people the trade had used as scenery. The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel idea about James’s ghosts, is the kind of off-center job he took when the town had filed him as finished. Then Coppola called. A lot of stars become residencies of their own myth. Brando became a man who would take the paycheck and still spit the statue back. Fond memory that keeps only Kowalski is a cleaned room. A pile-on that keeps only the late weight and the island is a different cleaned room. Both rooms leave out the person who went to Adler’s class and then would not stay grateful.
Six things most people never knew
- Omaha is the certificate, not a New York invention. April 3, 1924. Dorothy had wanted the stage. Shattuck expelled him. The Method sits on that house and that expulsion.
- Stella Adler is the teacher; the Actors Studio is the weather. 1943. The body first. The mumble was not a brand. It was a refusal to decorate.
- The contender line is the picture. On the Waterfront, 1954. Terry Malloy. It is not a memoir he handed the press.
- He directed one film. One-Eyed Jacks, 1961. Then he bought Tetiaroa and treated an atoll as the other studio.
- The 1973 Oscar was refused in public, for a reason. Sacheen Littlefeather. Hollywood’s Indians. Wounded Knee. The don and the refusal are the same career.
- Superman was a payday; Moreau was a wreck. Jor-El is the check. The island doctor is the late set that would not behave. Neither cancels Streetcar.
He married Anna Kashfi in 1957. Their son, Christian, was born in 1958. He married Movita Castaneda; their children include Miko and Rebecca. He married Tarita Teriipaia, whom he had met on Bounty; their children include Simon Teihotu and Cheyenne. There were other children, adopted and claimed, in the Tahitian household and in California. Friends from the early New York rooms describe a man who could be tender in a rehearsal and impossible at a contract. Both are the life.
On May 16, 1990, at the Mulholland Drive house, Christian shot Dag Drollet, Cheyenne’s companion. Drollet died. Christian pleaded to voluntary manslaughter and served prison time. Cheyenne, already ill, died by suicide in Tahiti in 1995. That is the family file. The work is still the life.
The later years
The years after the second statue were the island, the paydays, the rare part that still had danger in it, and a body that had stopped resembling the torn shirt. The Missouri Breaks (1976), with Jack Nicholson, is a Western that treats a regulator as a man in a dress and a joke. Superman (1978) paid him as Jor-El for a few days and a large check. Apocalypse Now (1979) is the last time the danger was complete: Colonel Kurtz in Coppola’s dark, shaved, quoting Eliot. A Dry White Season (1989) put him in an apartheid courtroom for a brief, serious turn. The Freshman (1990) let him parody the don opposite Matthew Broderick. Don Juan DeMarco (1995), with Johnny Depp, is a gentle late comedy. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) is the wreck the profiles prefer. The Score (2001), with Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, is the last picture: a Montreal safe-cracker, a professional who still knew how to hold a close-up. He published Songs My Mother Taught Me in 1994 and told the Omaha house, Adler, and the town as much as he intended to tell.
Tetiaroa remained the other studio — an atoll north of Papeete he had bought after Bounty and treated as a refuge the Mulholland house could not be. The Mulholland Drive house remained the California address. On May 16, 1990, Christian shot Dag Drollet there. Cheyenne died by suicide in Tahiti in 1995. Those are the family facts that sat in the same decades as the last parts. He appeared when the check or the argument was large enough. He recorded thoughts. He grew heavy in the way a man grows heavy when the body is no longer a tool he has to rent out every morning. Friends from the early New York rooms who still called describe a tenderness that the contract fights never advertised.
Pulmonary fibrosis and a failing heart closed the account. He died in Los Angeles on July 1, 2004. He was eighty. The funeral was private enough. Ashes went to Death Valley and to Tahiti, a split that fits a man who had kept two houses and two weathers. The Method did not send flowers. The pictures did. Kowalski is still on the landing. Terry Malloy is still in the car. The don is still in the study. Littlefeather’s minute is still on the Academy’s tape. The last close-up, in The Score, is a man who had already argued with the town for fifty years and was, that once, simply doing the job. Omaha is the first room. The Ethel Barrymore, December 1947, is the door. Mulholland and Tetiaroa are the last addresses. The torn shirt, the car, the don, and the woman on the Academy’s stage are the file. The late weight and the island are also the file. A complete life keeps both. Christian’s prison time and Cheyenne’s death in Tahiti sat in the same decades as The Freshman and The Score. He did not make those facts into a press tour. He kept the atoll, the Mulholland house, and the argument with the town until the lungs quit. The pictures kept the argument going after the lungs stopped. Tetiaroa is a resort now, built on the idea of his refuge. The Mulholland house is a fact in other people’s tours. The close-ups remain the real estate he actually left. Adler’s classroom is still the first serious room. The Academy’s tape is still the civic one.
After he was gone
Christian and the other children remained, in the complicated way a famous estate remains. Tetiaroa became a resort built on the idea of his refuge. Streetcar still teaches a young actor what a landing can hold. Waterfront still plays the car. The Godfather still opens a room. Littlefeather’s minute on that stage is now taught as a civic object, not a stunt. Every serious American close-up still pays him a tax in breath.
He came out of Omaha, was thrown out of a military school, sat with Adler, tore a shirt on Broadway, made Terry Malloy ache in a car, took a don and gave the statue back, filmed a tango the leading woman was not fully told about, sat in Coppola’s dark, bought an atoll, buried a daughter’s catastrophe in the same house as the work, and died in Los Angeles at eighty. If you only remember the undershirt, you have the still. If you remember Adler, the refusal, Tetiaroa, and the car, you have him.
Portrait: Paramount Pictures · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons