Marlon Brando Quotes

The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel to much.

Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite.

I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.

I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.

Regret is useless in life. It's in the past. All we have is now.

Do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.

‎We only have so many faces in our pockets

Earlier this week, Marlon Brando met with Jewish leaders to apologize for comments he made on Larry King Live, among them that “Hollywood is run by Jews.” The Jewish leaders accepted the actor’s apology and announced that Brando is now free to work again.

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

If we are not our brother's keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.

An actor's a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, ain't listening.

Real painters grunt like Marlon Brando

…there was a saying that Marlon Brando changed the way actors acted, James Dean changed the way people lived. I believe that.

I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.

(...the non-conformist, how do you keep from getting scarred?)/i don’t! i got a scar here…and uh i got a scar on my knee…and uh a few scars on my soul.

I've always found animals easy to love because their love is unconditional. They are trusting, loyal and undemanding except in wanting love in return.

[...] I realize that to forgive with your mind is not always to forgive in your heart.

There's a line in the picture where he (Johnny - The Wild One) snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening!

That’s a part of the sickness in America, that you have to think in terms of who wins, who loses, who’s good, who’s bad, who’s best, who’s worst…I don’t like to think that way. Everybody has their own value in different ways, and I don’t like to think who’s the best at this. I mean, what’s the point of it?

The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money." —Marlon Brando

In being a loving son, I suppose I was trying to become a loved son.

In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything—and I emphasize the word “think.” We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I’ve never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself.

He had all the rough and sultry appeal of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. Clive Owen in Sin City. Russell Crowe in everything he did.

[...] My sisters were either still at school or with friends, my mother was out drinking and my father was out whoring. As a result, I sought—as I still do— affection, loyalty and friendship from animals.

If you've never known love, you never know where it is, you don't know what it looks like or it sounds like, you look in the most unlikely places to find it.

[on why he considers Marlon Brando and Jean-Louis Trintignant to be his favorite actors] They don't externalize or project everything. They keep a mystery within themselves, and that I think is the sign of a truly great actor, to be able to maintain that.

I often ask, "What do you want to work at? If you have the chance. When you get out of school, college, the service, etc." Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I'm pleased for them* but it's a bit boring, because they are such squares. Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actor when they are "discovered" "like Marlon Brando, but in my own way." Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that he knows very well what he is going to do; it is something great; and he is indeed already doing it, which is the real test. The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is "I don't know," meaning, "I'm looking; I haven't found the right thing; it's discouraging but not hopeless." But the terrible answer is, "Nothing." The young man doesn't want to do anything. I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner's Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: "Nothing." They didn't believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they couldn't care less, I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that incident that many years later I am writing this book.

Maybe you’re desperate for love. Always have been in your life. But you’ve been distrustful of people. Is there anything about them that scares us, that’s dangerous, that’s going to hurt us? Because a lot of people are frightened to death of love.

I can still taste that first beer I bought with my own paycheck.

At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I'd been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don't remember why,

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. -- Stella Adler

He secretly thinks he looks like Marlon Brando, but take a good look a young Marlin Perkins is more like it! Maybe that’s what he sees in Annette Kelper—he’s an animal lover.

No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing.

People often say that an actor 'plays' a character well, but that's an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. That's what actors used to do, and then called it a characterization. In acting everything comes out of what you are, or some aspect of who you are.

That was the first day of my ongoing friendship with Marlon Brando. When he passed away, I got a phone call that he had left me a parcel of land on his Fiji island. It really threw me

Marlon Brando wanted to make Don Corleone ‘look like a bulldog’, so he stuffed his cheeks with cotton wool for the audition. For actual filming, he wore a mouthpiece made by a dentist;

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it.

If you learn how to work and grow, you will find that your life cannot be destroyed by the outside world. If you have to work eight hours a day, give three or one that belongs to you without money. This "Who Are You?" has to be reinforced.

The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals.

Dodie: "Mama, Jamie's up on the hill and he's f***g a goat!" Mama: "Well, it's Jamie's goat, ain't it?" -Peter Manso illustrates the brash wit pervasive in the Brando family with this exchange between Dodie Brando, Marlon's mother, and her mother in-law.

Her reason for agreeing to sit down with a stranger was that she’d fallen under his charm. She’d immediately liked his mixture of awkwardness and obviousness, an attitude floundering between Pierre Richard and Marlon Brando. Physically, he had something she appreciated in men: he was a little cross-eyed. Just a little, but still enough to notice. Yes, finding this detail about him was incredible. What’s more, he was called François. She’d always liked that name. Elegant and calm—like her idea of the fifties.

Every spring the meadow in front of the house became an ocean of canary-colored mustard blossoms, and when a wind came up, it was like watching a sea of rippling golden waves rising and falling with the breeze like breakers just before they pound into a reef.

think Jane Fonda has done something. I could see her doing most anything. Redford’s certainly been effective in pursuing his interests. Who always sings I Left My

The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.

It must have been spring because the big tree in front of the house was shedding pods with two wings like a dragonfly, On days when there wasn't any wind, they would spin around in the air as they drifted softly to the ground. I watched them float all the way down, sitting with my neck craned back until my mouth opened and holding out my hand just in case, but they never landed on it. When one hit the ground I'd look up again, my eyes darting, waiting for the next magical event, the sun warming the yellow hairs on my head. Waiting like that for the next magic was as good a moment as any other that I can remember in the last sixty -five years.

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it. • chapter eight • Russell Bufalino In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps. Ironically,

Wearing Deni's huge vicuna coat with the si cap over my ears, in cold biting winds of December New York, Irwin and Simon led me up to the Russian Tea Room to meet Salvador Dali. He was sitting with his chin on a finely decorated tile headed cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a cane, blue and white, next to his wife at the Cafe table. He had a little wax moustache, thin. When the waiter asked him what he wanted he said 'One grapefruit...peenk!' and he had big blue eyes like a baby, a real or Spaniard. He told us no artist was great unless he made money. Was he talking about Uccello, Ghianondri, Franca? We didn't even know what money really was or what to do with it. Dali had already read an article about the 'insurgent' 'beats' and was interested. When Irwin told him (in Spanish) we wanted to meet Marlon Brando (who ate in this Russian Tea Room) he said, waving three fingers at me, 'He is more beautiful than M. Brando.' I wondered why he said that but he probably had a tiff with old Marlon. But what he meant was my eyes, which were blue, like his, and my hair, which is black, like his, and when I looked into his eyes, and he looked into my eyes, we couldn't stand all that sadness. In fact, when Dali and I look in the mirror we can't stand all that sadness. To Dali sadness is beautiful.

There have been several intellectual lesbians of physical distinction: Collette, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles; and, in altogether another category, simple endearing prettiness, both Eleanor Clark and Katherine Anne Porter deserve their reputations. But Alice Lee Langman was a perfected presence, an enameled lady marked with the androgynous quality, that sexually ambivalent aura that seems a common denominator among certain persons whose allure crosses all frontiers--a mystique not confined to women, for Nureyev has it, Nehru had it, so did the youthful Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, so did Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

When I accept in the depth of my being that the ultimate accomplishment of my life is 'me' - the person I've become and who other persons are because of me - then living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness is not a technique, not a craft, not the Carnegian ploy of how to win friends and influence people, but a way of life, a distinctive and engaged presence to God, other ragamuffins, and myself." ... "Matthew 9:36 - 'When Jesus saw the crowds, he felt sorry for them. [This] speaks of the essential tenderness of Jesus, his way of looking at the world, and his deepest feelings about us sin-scarred ragamuffins." re: Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in "Apocalypse Now" "Real freedom is freedom from the opinions of others. Above all, freedom from your opinions about yourself.

The firm’s fourth partner, Jeff Nussbaum, had carved out a niche writing jokes for public figures. It was he who taught me about the delicate balance all public-sector humorists hope to strike. Writing something funny for a politician, I learned, is like designing something stunning for Marlon Brando past his prime. The qualifier is everything. At first I didn’t understand this. In June, President Obama’s speechwriters asked Jeff to pitch jokes for an upcoming appearance at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner. I sent him a few ideas, including one about the president and First Lady’s recent trip to see a Broadway show: “My critics are upset it cost taxpayer dollars to fly me and Michelle to New York for date night. But let me be clear. That wasn’t spending. It was stimulus.” Unsurprisingly, my line about stimulating America’s first couple didn’t make it into the script. But others did. The morning after the speech, I watched on YouTube as President Obama turned to NBC reporter Chuck Todd. “Chuck embodies the best of both worlds: he has the rapid-fire style of a television correspondent, and the facial hair of a radio correspondent.” That was my joke! I grabbed the scroll bar and watched again. The line wasn’t genius. The applause was largely polite. Still, I was dumbfounded. A thought entered my brain, and then, just a few days later, exited the mouth of the president of the United States. This was magic. Still, even then, I had no illusions of becoming a presidential speechwriter. When friends asked if I hoped to work in the White House, I told them Obama had more than enough writers already. I meant it.

The leveling down of the European man is our greatest danger. This is the prospect that depresses us. Today we see nothing that wants to become greater. We suspect that all goes ever downward, becoming thinner, more sleazy, smarter, cozier, more ordinary, more indifferent. Exactly here lies the crisis. With the fear of man, we have also lost the love of man - reverence for him, hope in him. The human prospect wearies us. What is the current nihilism if it is not that? We are tired of man.

The late Marlon Brando was once asked if he considered himself the best actor in Hollywood. That was a treacherous question, but Brando answered it in a creative way. He said, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m the best actor. I’m the best-positioned actor. People know me, and they want me around. I make life interesting for the people around me. It’s fun for me and it’s fun for them. I’m not always a nice guy, but I’m never the same guy twice. That’s why studios want to put me in movies, and that’s why the public wants to see me there.” Are you like Brando in this respect? Do you get together with your colleagues even when you don’t have to? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track. If the answer is no, ask yourself, whom would you rather be with? Then think about how you can make a career move in that direction. Do you communicate with your colleagues even when it’s not strictly necessary—by phone, e-mail, or in person? Or are you more comfortable being on your own? There probably has never been a person who was more challenged in this area than Howard Hughes. He was undeniably a technical expert, and he was certainly unforgettable. He could design an airplane, fly it, and also direct a movie about it.

Marlon showed me generosity, too, but I don't think he saved it all for me, because he shared it with the audience. It's what made his performance so memorable and so endearing. We all fantasize about having someone like Don Vito we can turn to. So many people are abused in this life, but if you've got a Godfather, you've got someone you can go to, and they will take care of it. That's why people responded to him in the film. It was more than just the bravado and the boldness; it was the humanity underneath it. That's why he had to play Vito larger than life- his physical size, the shoe polish in his hair, the cotton in his cheeks. His Godfather had to be an icon, and Brando made him as iconic as Citizen Kane or Superman, Julius Caesar or George Washington. p124

It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else. The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.

[on American Indians] When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues.

For Robert Lee Hodge, it was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies.

Robert Lee Hodge was the Marlon Brando of the bloat.

You’re okay, and you’re going to be okay.  I didn’t say you won’t be scared.  The anger, fear, anxiety, and depression you’ll feel are like masks at Halloween.  And, you’ll see them again and again in your life.  But it gets easier the older you get. 

So Meyer Lansky was Hyman Roth? Was Marlon Brando Frank Costello? The confusion was compounded when quite serious newspapers started incorporating Godfather comparisons into their reporting on organized crime.

Compared by one commentator to “the death rattle of a seagull,” Costello’s voice was later said to have provided the model for Marlon Brando’s memorable performance in The Godfather.

(un rally de motociclistas borrachos y peleoneros que la prensa sensacionalista retrató como apocalíptico), la película The Wild One, de 1953, lanzó al mundo la imagen de un Marlon Brando vestido con pantalones de mezclilla, camiseta blanca y chamarra de cuero, interpretando al líder de una pandilla de motociclistas. Dos años después, en 1955, James Dean inmortalizaría esa misma imagen, y lo que representaba, en la película Rebelde sin causa.

The White House has a Fountain and Rat Race running.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

John Belushi embodied Gonzo in its rawest form. It was no accident that he had an intense friendship with the Prince of Gonzo himself, Hunter Thompson—Thompson once said that John was more fun in twenty minutes than most people were in twenty years. Neither was it a coincidence that Belushi did a superb imitation of Marlon Brando, the original Wild One. Like Brando, John didn’t seem to act his emotions onstage so much as exorcise them. Many of his strongest characters—the Samurai Warrior, Rasputin, the demon child Damien—spoke no words at all. Belushi breathed them to life on the power of sheer presence, and, strangely, it is the power of sheer presence that transmits best through the tubes and transistors of television.

La Habana era una locura: yo creo que era la ciudad con más vida de todo el mundo. ¡Qué carajo París ni Nueva York! Demasiado frío... ¡Vida nocturna la de aquí! Verdad que había putas, había drogas y había mafia, pero la gente se divertía y la noche empezaba a las seis de la tarde y no se acababa nunca. ¿Te imaginas que en una misma noche podías tomarte una cerveza a las ocho oyendo a las Anacaonas en los Aires Libres del Prado, comer a las nueve con la música y las canciones de Bola de Nieve, luego sentarte en el Saint John a oír a Elena Burke, después irte a un cabaret a bailar con Benny Moré, con la Aragón, con la Casino de Playa, con la Sonora Matancera, descansar un rato vacilando los boleros de Olga Guillot, Vicentico Valdés, Ñico Membiela... o irte a oír a los muchachos del feeling, al ronco José Antonio Méndez, a César Portillo y, para cerrar la noche, a las dos de la mañana, escaparte a la playa de Marianao a ver el espectáculo del Chori tocando sus timbales, y tú ahí, como si nada, sentado entre Marlon Brando y Cab Calloway, al lado de Errol Flynn y de Josephine Baker. Y después, si todavía te quedaba aire, bajar a La Gruta, ahí en La Rampa, para amanecer metido en una descarga de jazz de Cachao con Tata Güines, Barreto, Bebo Valdés, el Negro Vivar, Frank Emilio y todos esos locos que son los mejores músicos que ha dado Cuba? Eran miles, la música estaba en la atmósfera, se podía cortar con un cuchillo, había que apartarla para poder pasar...

The actor must not only 'do his job' in a conscientious manner, which is what anyone must do; he must also trap his unconscious (a neat trick) and he must trap it on cue (a neater trick). [...] Should the actor work out the details of his part in personal terms, should he succeed in engaging his own secret anxieties and enjoyments - his private beliefs, his dream-life characteristics, should he then insinuate these secrets into the ebbing and flowing of the play, he will be inevitably swept into the main lines of the action - he will be forced unconsciously from point to point in his performance. The more certainly and firmly these guide ropes have been rigged, the more the actor can afford to forget them and begin to shade his playing. Most observes say to actors, 'How do you remember all those lines?' What a lovely irony, since the actor's most elusive achievement is to forget them! Or, to put it more clearly, to know them so well and to understand their implications so well that he can afford to forget them. Marlon Brando once said, 'I am good when I forget. When I can sit on stage and think of catching a fish. I have just sunk the hook, there's a tug on the line, and at that preoccupied moment, I hear my cue. My God, what is my line? And then I say my line, because the motor memory will save you if you really believe. So I say my line, the line I thought I'd forgotten, and it's good, man. It's really good.' Sounds mysterious, but it isn't. It is merely a neat trick. Catching Pegasus by the heel is a neat trick. It proceeds not from hard labor but from a knowledge of the self. Such knowledge is hard-bought, but it is not like digging ditches. It is a giving-over of the ego. [...]

The actor must not only 'do his job' in a conscientious manner, which is what anyone must do; he must also trap his unconscious (a neat trick) and he must trap it on cue (a neater trick). [...] Should the actor work out the details of his part in personal terms, should he succeed in engaging his own secret anxieties and enjoyments - his private beliefs, his dream-life characteristics, should he then insinuate these secrets into the ebbing and flowing of the play, he will be inevitably swept into the main lines of the action - he will be forced unconsciously from point to point in his performance. The more certainly and firmly these guide ropes have been rigged, the more the actor can afford to forget them and begin to shade his playing. Most observes say to actors, 'How do you remember all those lines?' What a lovely irony, since the actor's most elusive achievement is to forget them! Or, to put it more clearly, to know them so well and to understand their implications so well that he can afford to forget them. Marlon Brando once said, 'I am good when I forget. When I can sit on stage and think of catching a fish. I have just sunk the hook, there's a tug on the line, and at that preoccupied moment, I hear my cue. My God, what is my line? And then I say my line, because the motor memory will save you if you really believe. So I say my line, the line I thought I'd forgotten, and it's good, man. It's really good.' Sounds mysterious, but it isn't. It is merely a neat trick. Catching Pegasus by the heel is a neat trick. It proceeds not from hard labor but from a knowledge of the self. Such knowledge is hard-bought, but it is not like digging ditches. It is a giving-over of the ego.

Coppola stopped his pacing and told the cast he had an idea. He wanted them to play some scenes he had in mind, scenes just for the rehearsals—“not in the shooting script,” he said—scenes that would give them “memories” to carry with them through their performances. No doubt, from his comfortable repose, the Buddha stirred a little at this. “One thing I often do,” Coppola explained, “is have a scene where two characters meet for the first time, even though in the story they’ve already known each other for a while. I find that giving the cast sensual memories always helps them. As artists, as they’re playing a scene, just the fact that they share a memory—it becomes like a little emotional deposit in their bank account that enables them to better know each other.

Marlon Brando acted with passion. His mission was to act . . . and act as though he was not acting. His dialogue had this eloquence of supreme hauteur that singled him out as a winsome virtuoso of invaluable art.

Hugh Liedtke had a simple rule of thumb: Pick a name that started with either A or Z, so you would be first or last in the telephone listings. With that in mind, the team chose Zapata Petroleum Corporation, after the Marlon Brando movie Viva Zapata!, which was playing in Midland.

February 27: Marlon Brando sends Marilyn an encouraging telegram, saying, in part, “[D]on’t be afraid of being afraid. It can only help. Relax and enjoy it. I send you my thoughts and my warmest affections. Marlon.

When it's really fashionable, there's something wrong. An actor once came up to me and said, "I'm a Meth. . ." and he mumbled something. I said, "Get out of here. I don't want that around. It's too corrupt.

The result of this is a disrespect for the world in general and a foreignness to anything around him that isn't immediately recognizable to his everyday habits. He has even begun to lose perspective on what his own assets and faults are, because he has nothing to measure these things against.

He hadn’t wanted fame, and forever mourned the anonymity once so dear to him. “I can’t convey how discomforting it is not to be able to be a normal person,” Brando once lamented, a statement that goes a long way toward allowing us to understand him.

Like Barbra Streisand, who just opened her mouth and sang without ever having a singing lesson, it was hard for Brando to view something that came so naturally to him as a great gift, let alone genius. Praised for his acting versatility, he recoiled: “You can say the same thing about a hula hoop.

The rise of television made the situation even worse, bringing a glut of celebrities to “inane talk shows,” Marlon said, where they “babble on about nothing.” Meanwhile, in Mississippi, he pointed out, “state troopers were keeping James Meredith,” a black student, from “his constitutional right” of attending his classes at Ole Miss. Was this really the sort of media Americans wanted? Perhaps it was, Marlon realized to his horror. The reason television airtime wasn’t filled with more Shakespeare or more honest political debate was “because the American people don’t want to see it,” he said. The public greedily consumed gossip about the private lives of celebrities while stories of black teenagers being arrested on the streets of Los Angeles went untold. Marlon called it a “peephole impulse,” and concluded that it came from the public’s “naïveté.” Through “immersion in nonsense” fed to them by the media, people were content to live in blissful ignorance of “the painful truths of the world.” By the early 1960s, Marlon made it his mission to open people’s eyes. “I’ve decided,” he told one reporter, “I finally want to speak out against slop-oriented journalism and the conversational scavengers who exploit for profit and libel for entertainment.” That was essential, he said, in any effort to “change the way the public saw the world.” People got their impressions of the world through the media—so the media, in Marlon’s view, needed to be changed.

After Julius Caesar, Marlon became, in the words of his friend Billy Redfield, “the only American actor to be seriously thought of as Hamlet,” the great hope of American theater enthusiasts to finally measure up against the English. “We who saw him in his first, shocking days,” said Redfield, “believed in him not only as an actor, but also as an artistic, spiritual and specifically American leader. We flung him at the English as though we owned him and we all but shouted, ‘He does without your damned elocution lessons, your fruity voices, your artificial changings of pitch and stress, your bleeding love of words, words, words, and your high-toned, fustian, bombace technique. He throws away your books and burns your academies. He does it from within. And he is better than all of you!

He was still holding her hand when Dodie died at 5:20 a.m. Marlon bent over his mother’s body. Carefully, he snipped off a lock of her hair. Then he took her pillow and removed an aquamarine ring from her finger. Clutching these talismans, he made his way outside, where the sun was just coming up. “I felt instantly that she had been transformed into everything that was reflective of nature,” he said. Birds, plants, animals, little children—they were all Dodie. Standing there outside the hospital, in the crisp morning air, Marlon suddenly had a vision (“I actually saw it,” he insisted) of a great bird “floating up and down the face of a cliff.” This was his mother, he believed, rising to the sky. The bird made its ascent to the strains of Ferde Grofé’s “Mississippi Suite,” a stirring orchestral piece Ellen had introduced Marlon to, and which he often found himself humming.

But what was he “selling out” exactly, and to whom? Almost from the start of Brando’s career, some people seemed to believe they were owed something from him and that he was being stingy in paying it back. Because they’d held such high opinions of him, they were angry when he didn’t meet, or share, their expectations. People such as Shipman bemoaned Brando’s not taking seriously what, in their view, was more important than anything else: acting. But his priorities were different: Teti’aroa, his children’s education, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the standoff at Wounded Knee.

But nearly everything else has missed Brando’s story in both the details and the bigger picture—a particularly regrettable situation for a man whom most agree was the supreme American actor. For example, there’s the myth, endlessly repeated, that Brando was a Method actor, when in fact he loathed the very concept and found those who used the term pretentious.

Why had it become so important in the second half of the twentieth century not just to succeed, but to succeed beyond all expectations? How much did one need?

In 1973, his refusal of an Oscar was perceived as the ultimate insult to the moviegoing public by an eccentric egotist. Yet, forty-five years later, during the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Jada Pinkett Smith found affirmation for her own decision to boycott the Oscars by watching a clip of Sacheen Littlefeather refusing Brando’s award. Today, calling out Hollywood’s racism is no longer an extremist act. In the 1960s, Brando’s protests against racial segregation and discrimination—he was arrested at least once—were condemned by some as needlessly provocative. Now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, they seem the very least someone in Brando’s position could have done during that period of widespread injustice.

Marlon was calling out the media for its increasing focus on trivia and trumpery and its single-minded preoccupation with the bottom line. Money—profits—drove everything. Where did it end? Where was America heading?

Fixing himself meant fixing the world, too. “If I am not my brother’s keeper,” Marlon wrote, “then who am I?

I often get terribly discouraged,” Marlon wrote, “when I think that with all the extensive techniques we have at hand to communicate with each other, so remarkably little is accomplished.” He feared the problem was not with the technology, but rather, the fact “that the only thing most of us want to communicate is hatred and distruction [sic].

He has served as a gadfly stinging America’s conscience,” the paper editorialized, “reminding the country of its evil past and urging it to face up to the responsibility to redeem itself. Americans don’t like to be criticized for their racial misdeeds. They falsify their history to bolster their sense of Nordic superiority. The Indians have been deprived of land and culture. Their rates of unemployment, suicide and alcoholism are above the national averages. The family incomes on the reservations are below the accepted poverty levels by nearly half. They need all the publicity they can get. Brando used the right forum, the right audience, the right moment to draw attention to a cause that has been too long neglected.

trauma takes a very long time to heal, if ever.

There was, he said, something pervasive going on that was changing the tone and character of the national discourse. An obsession with celebrity, epitomized by paparazzi chasing down stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was becoming ubiquitous. Magazines and newspapers that “purport to be responsible organs” were making “these pompous and condescending decisions about lives, about facts and situations.” Where did that lead? As Marlon explained later, “I was concerned that the freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment were being misused to create a press that faced no consequences for diminishing the intelligence of the nation.

A great disservice was done to American actors,” Stella told her students, “when they were persuaded that they had to experience themselves on the stage instead of experiencing the play.” The answer wasn’t in an actor’s past, Stella argued, but in the writer’s script. “Oh, sweetheart,” she’d counsel a flailing actor, “we don’t need your emotion. We need the text.

Don’t use yourself. You’re too small. Find it in your imagination.’” And Bud—the milk squirter, the door buster, the window jumper, the people watcher—had “more imagination than any human being” Ellen had ever known. “If he’d had to go inside,” she said, “the way Strasberg would have insisted, he would have had a breakdown. It would have been chaos. Chaos, I tell you. And the world would never have known Marlon Brando, the great actor.

That night, during rehearsals for Power, cheers from a demonstration outside distracted the actors. Bud followed some of his fellow students out onto the sidewalk. There were placards and posters supporting labor, chants of “one for all, all for one,” and calls for the removal of Francisco Franco in Spain. Bud seemed delighted, the second-year student thought. All at once, lifting his fist in a show of power, Bud shouted, “Proletariat of the world, unite!

She had only one human companion, but a menagerie of dogs and cats. Her only connection to the outside world was a radio. Marlon was in awe. This was exactly the sort of retreat from the world he longed for, the sanctuary he needed to survive.

Some would try to argue that without that constantly roiling inner turmoil, he might not have become such a great actor. To such arguments, Marlon grew impatient. “What you’re saying,” he replied, “is that unless you irritate an oyster with a sand grain, he will not make the necessary compensations for the purposes of that sand grain, and will [therefore] never create the pearl.” He made a sound of contempt. “Who gives a damn about the pearl?

Marlon was distraught. The execution, he wrote to Bud Burdick, had been “an act of vengeance” against a man “suffering from an emotional disease.” In the days that followed, he felt bereft. He missed the regular interactions he’d had with Bud and others in the anti-capital punishment crusade. “There is no one here who understands,” he told Burdick. He longed for the fellowship of people who thought as he did, who prioritized things the way he did, who saw the world the same. Within the circle of activists, Marlon was beloved, a very different experience from what he’d known in Hollywood. “Your visit here did a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of good,” Burdick wrote to him. “There was a fearful sense of being isolated and eccentric. You . . . did a lot to evaporate that feeling.

America was embarking on a decade-long crisis of faith, principles, and identity. Long-cherished notions of what was right and what was wrong were being challenged. Ideas about family, race, patriotism, even God—all were up for reconsideration. Not surprisingly, Marlon was in the midst of it. Just as he had personified the cultural moment of the 1950s, when views of masculinity, gender, power, and sexuality were in flux, now he was at the forefront of a movement asking Americans to reconsider their moral priorities. The country was split. Although polls showed a slim majority opposing capital punishment, the minority opinion was loud and emphatic, and it let Marlon know how it felt.

imagination and not emotional memory” was the key to successful acting.

To be an actor,” Capote said, “you have to have absolutely no pride. You have to be a thing, an object.

You split yourself down the middle,” he said, when you go against principle for material gain.