Marlon Brando

His father sold things out of state and his mother acted on the stage and drank, and the housekeeper the boy had attached himself to left to get married, which is where his biographers locate the abandonment. The family went from Omaha to Evanston to Santa Ana to a farmhouse in Libertyville, Illinois. He was good at sports and drama and failed everything else, was held back a year, and was expelled from Libertyville High in 1941. His father shipped him to Shattuck Military Academy, where in 1943 the faculty voted him out for sneaking into town while confined to campus and the students objected that it was too harsh. He dug ditches, tried to enlist, and was rejected over a football knee. Then New York.

Stella Adler taught him Stanislavski at the New School. When she told the class to act like chickens with a bomb coming, he sat still and laid an egg, and said a chicken knows nothing about bombs. He opened as Stanley Kowalski on Broadway in 1947 under Elia Kazan and did it again on film in 1951. On the Waterfront won the Academy Award in 1954. The Godfather won him a second in 1972, which he refused, sending Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony in Plains Indian regalia to decline it over the treatment of American Indians. He denied being a method actor and said he could not stand Lee Strasberg's teaching. From the start he read his lines off cards, over the objections of the directors he worked with, because memorized speech sounded to him like somebody else reciting.

On May 16, 1990, his son Christian shot and killed Dag Drollet in the living room of the Beverly Hills house. Drollet was the boyfriend of Christian's half-sister Cheyenne, who was eight months pregnant by him. Brando had Cheyenne admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Tahiti, and without her testimony the prosecution could not prove premeditation. Christian pleaded guilty to manslaughter and spent five years in prison. Brando took the stand at Santa Monica and said he thought perhaps he had failed as a father. Cheyenne attempted suicide twice during the proceedings and hanged herself at her mother's house in Tahiti in 1995, at 25, after losing custody of her son. Brando fathered at least 11 children and was known for how he treated the women who bore them.

He refused the tubes that would have kept him breathing and died at UCLA Medical Center on July 1, 2004, of respiratory failure. What gets argued about now is the second half of the career. Pauline Kael had written him off in 1966 as a buffoon mocking his own reputation, and his biographer Stefan Kanfer answers that even inside the worst late films there is a sudden luminous minute. The other legacy is a promise kept sideways. In 1973 he talked Wally Cox's widow into letting him scatter his oldest friend's ashes, then kept them for 20 years until she found out. His family later mixed the two men's remains and scattered them in Death Valley and Tahiti.

Marlon Brando's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Streetcar Named Desire other
  The Broadway production. Tallulah Bankhead had recommended him for it after firing him 1947
• A Streetcar Named Desire film
  The Kazan film. His first Academy Award nomination 1951
• On the Waterfront film
  His first Academy Award for Best Actor 1954
• One-Eyed Jacks film
  The only film he directed 1961
• The Godfather film
  A second Academy Award, refused at the ceremony through Sacheen Littlefeather 1972
• Apocalypse Now film
  A million dollars a week for three weeks as Colonel Kurtz 1979

• 1941 aged ~17 Expelled from Libertyville High School after being held back a year
• 1943 aged ~19 The Shattuck faculty votes to expel him and the students petition against it He was invited back for the next year and dropped out of high school instead.
• 1944 aged ~20 Reaches Broadway in I Remember Mama He turned down The Iceman Cometh after falling asleep over the script.
• 1947 aged ~23 Opens as Stanley Kowalski under Elia Kazan Eight shows a week of screaming and breaking things. He called it an emotional grind.
• 1954 aged ~30 Wins the Academy Award for On the Waterfront His mother died the same year, and he named his production company Pennebaker after her.
• 1964 aged ~40 Arrested at a fish-in near Tacoma over Native treaty fishing rights
• 1973 aged ~49 Refuses the Oscar for The Godfather through Sacheen Littlefeather The same year Wally Cox died and Brando took possession of his ashes.
• May 16, 1990 aged 66 His son Christian shoots and kills Dag Drollet in the Beverly Hills house Christian pleaded guilty to manslaughter and spent five years in prison.
• 1995 aged ~71 Cheyenne Brando hangs herself in Tahiti at 25 She had lost custody of her son and had attempted suicide twice during her brother's case.
• July 1, 2004 aged 80 Dies of respiratory failure at UCLA Medical Center He had refused the oxygen tubes that would have prolonged his life.

• Tennessee Williams 1911–1983
  Playwright whose A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof defined American theater. wrote the role that made him
• Francis Ford Coppola b. 1939
  Director and producer whose landmark films helped define the New Hollywood era and modern American epic filmmaking. directed him in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now
• Jack Nicholson b. 1937
  Three-time Oscar winner and one of the most celebrated actors in Hollywood history. friend and costar in The Missouri Breaks
• Sidney Poitier 1927–2022
  First Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, breaking barriers in Hollywood. marched with him on Washington in August 1963
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. the 1963 march he joined