Marlon Brando was an egomaniac. He was Vito Corleone. He was morbidly obese. He was Colonel Kurtz. He ushered in an age of prima donna-ism that helped cement the Hollywood star system. He could single-handedly make awful movies watchable. He occasionally walked through roles. He was Terry Malloy. He was in Hollywood only because he didn’t have the “moral courage to refuse the money.” He was the greatest actor ever burned onto celluloid.
Brando will be remembered because he was an iconoclast – method acting altered the course of film, and he was the greatest proponent the style ever had – and he was as complicated and fascinating playing Paul in “Last Tango in Paris” as he was in his infamous “Larry King Live” appearance, wearing heavy makeup and kissing the host.
His personal life bled onto his screen personas, and his characters became his life. Even as the most recognizable actor in the world, he could physically disappear into a role, and distinguishing Brando from Corleone, Paul, Kurtz, Malloy, Stanley Kowalski or Johnny Strabler is logically impossible.
However, his true mark cannot be seen from reading his career in reverse – no matter how stunning a performance he created, Brando will always just be an excellent character actor who could play his roles in creative ways. What is most staggering about Brando is the fact that every actor in every movie acts exactly like him.
As Kowalski in the stage version of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Brando was criticized for mumbling his lines and turning his back to the audience – a universal faux pas at the time. His gritty performance earned him fanatical followers and a chance to play Kowalski in the film version, in which he reprised the role, spreading the word of method acting to the masses. It earned him legions of professional followers the caliber of Jack Nicholson and Robert Duvall and institutionalized his acting style.
While he will be surely remember and idolized as The Wild One and Kowalski, for many the most enduring image of Brando is as Kurtz, an insane colonel living in a jungle fiefdom in 1979’s “Apocalypse Now.” The film, Francis Ford Coppola’s tome on the Vietnam War, is widely considered among the finest war movies ever made. He was surrounded by the finest acting core ever assembled, with Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper doing some heavy lifting, and yet he still personally made the movie great.
He became Kurtz – reclusive, bizarre and frightening – and, at a point when many considered him over-the-hill, he silenced his critics and cemented his reputation as the greatest living actor, a moniker that stood for 25 years through mostly atrocious films and his ever-expanding hubris. In the end, the men he played have outlived him and in fact achieved immortality, and his central conflict – between man and character – is over.
