Marlon Brando, arguably the greatest film actor of the 20th century, has died at the age of 80. The two-time Oscar winner passed away yesterday at a Los Angeles hospital, according to his lawyer. He had recently been suffering from pneumonia.
The leading proponent of the Method school of American acting, Brando brought an anguished, physical intensity to his roles that made him a symbol for the burgeoning 1950s youth culture. He won two best actor Oscars, for his roles in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront and Francis Coppola's The Godfather.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Brando was an unruly child. He was expelled from a variety of schools and military academy and struggled to look after his alcoholic mother. Alighting in New York as a teenager, he enrolled at the Actors Studio and studied method acting under Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.
Brando cut his teeth in the theatre, winning rave reviews for his turn as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire - a role he would later play on screen. He made his film debut in 1950 as a paraplegic war veteran in The Men and courted controversy for his iconic role as a leather-clad biker in The Wild One.
To his peers Brando was by turns an inspiration and an enigma. He was famously dismissive of his own talent and contemptuous of the industry as a whole. But he was also a passionate political activist who allied himself to the civil rights movement and refused his 1972 Oscar for The Godfather in protest at the US government's policy towards Native Americans.
Off-screen, Brando's life was beset by tragedy. His son Christian was convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of his sister's boyfriend in 1990. His daughter Cheyenne committed suicide in 1995. In recent months Brando himself was reported as being nearly destitute, having blown his fortune on legal battles.
On-screen, however, Brando was never less than electrifying - even on those all too frequent occasions when he seemed to be deliberately sabotaging a movie. His long-time friend Jack Nicholson once remarked: "Brando is the best, the actor that we all look up to. When he goes, the rest of us move up one place."
"The only thing an actor owes to his public is not to bore them," Marlon Brando once said. Throughout his 80 years, he could be enraging, enthralling, mysterious and exasperating. But Marlon Brando was never boring.