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By Susan Mizruchi
It was the late 1970s and one of Hollywood’s hottest directors had undertaken an incredible challenge: to make cinematic sense of America’s devastating war in Vietnam. The film shoot was wildly out of control: typhoons and cost overruns, a death from an accident on set, and a heart attack suffered by lead actor Martin Sheen. As some tell it, the biggest of all the problems on the terribly vexed set of Apocalypse Now was Marlon...
When Marlon Brando arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1943, he was a Nebraskan by way of Illinois with a knack for mimicry. Just four years later, he would transform himself into one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century, originating the role of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In the prolific career, and very public personal life, that followed, Brando would be commended...
July 1 of this year marks the 10th anniversary of actor Marlon Brando’s death. While most people know Brando as a leading man, not everyone knows of his wide and varied exploits beyond the screen. Here are four things you might not have known about Marlon Brando, as provided by Austin Wilkin, archivist for the Marlon Brando estate.
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It’s been ten years today since the world’s most famous Method actor died. Did we even know the guy? Consider these lesser-known facts.
By Jonathan Kiefer on July 1, 2014
HE WAS IN A CHARLIE CHAPLIN MOVIE.
That is, a movie directed by Chaplin. The 1967 romantic comedy A Countess from Hong Kong, also starring Sophia Loren. This was five years before The Godfather. It was the last film Chaplin made.
Link to Photos:
Text from the article, as written by Ben Cosgrove, Editor of LIFE.com:
The year was 1949, and 25-year-old Marlon Brando — “the brilliant brat,” as LIFE magazine called him following his astonishing work on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire — had finally answered the call of Hollywood. He was preparing for his movie debut in The Men, the wrenching story of a paralyzed World War II...
Illustration by Jackie Lay. Photos by Bert Reisfeld/Picture-Alliance/dpa/AP; ASSOCIATED PRESS; Mondadori/Getty
TOM SHONE JUN 25 2014
Hollywood extracted entirely the wrong moral from the story of Marlon Brando. Working when the studio-contract system crumbled in the 1950s, he quickly leveraged the power he had accrued from his theatrical performances into a series of one-picture deals, allowing him to exercise unprecedented freedom in selecting roles. Straight out of the gate, he played a...
From Los Angeles NPR Station KPCC:
It is possible Marlon Brando was a star for too long and became famous for being famous – simplified as a movie star, a sex symbol, a lone wolf. Author Susan Mizruchi pores over Brando’s letters, audiotapes, his writings and research to reveal a self-educated intellectual.. “I can report,” she writes, “that Brando’s hunger for knowledge was as insatiable as his more legendary appetites for women and food.”
Listen...
Photo Credit: Stephanie Rausser
In retrospect, it’s hard to tell whether Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann knew ahead of time that the 45th Academy Awards ceremony was about to get turned upside down. They certainly looked nervous as they announced that Marlon Brando had won the Oscar for best actor, for his role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. They glanced warily toward the audience as a young Native American woman,...
Listen to Poncho Sanchez play Marlon Brando’s drum invention on NPR:
“In a nondescript storage facility in West Los Angeles sits a little-known bit of Hollywood history. It concerns the late legendary actor Marlon Brando, but it’s not about any of his stage or screen roles.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL STORY:
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/03/137558144/marlon-brandos-lost-musical-innovation
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“In 1964, Adams, an Assiniboine-Sioux, brought actor Marlon Brando to the Northwest to bring attention to native “fish-ins,” expecting him to fish illegally in solidarity with the tribes at Frank’s Landing near the mouth of the Nisqually. He got TV newsman Charles Kuralt to interview Mr. Frank’s father, but Brando ultimately was arrested on the banks of the Puyallup River. It would be another decade before U.S. District Judge George Boldt affirmed the tribes’ right...
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