Marlon Brando, biography

When in 1947 Marlon Brando appeared on stage in a t-shirt torn and wet with sweat, it was something like an earthquake. Gore Vidal wrote about the Broadway debut of the actor: "Kowalski changed the idea of sexuality in America. Before him, not a single man was considered erotic. The man was not a body, but a suit." After the powerful role of the brutal pole, it turned out that the acting profession has changed forever. Martin Scorsese said that there is a cinema "before Brando"and" after Brando". Almost 60 years later, when Brando's obituary in the New York Times called his contribution to art "epochal," it looked like an underappreciation.

Brando learned the art of acting intuitively. He combined a powerful physique with the wounded soul of the poet, which was manifested, as Truman Capote wrote, "in small trembling hands, plump lips, relaxed, sensual expression and voice, which heard something timid, surprisingly boyish." Brando was the son of a cruel father-a drunkard and mother, an actress-alcoholic. He was kicked out of military school, he was thinking of studying for a priest — before he left for new York. "He needs to find something in life and in himself — something that is always true, and for this he needs to give his life," said one of his friends.

This" something " for him was acting. Critic Pauline Cale, seeing Brando in the production of "Cafe by the road", where he played the role of a soldier who returned home to kill the unfaithful wife, decided that the convulsions of the actor on stage are real. "I've never seen anything more physiological," she admitted. With the same impression the shocked public after "tram "Desire " dispersed", and soon Brando was nicknamed"Valentino of generation of bona". He liked this definition very much. One friend recalled: "on the wall in his room hung the inscription:"You do not live, if you do not know about it." He could play the bongs and bring home vagabonds and beggars — those who depended on him. Similarly, it was the case with the girls — he liked simpletons like secretaries".

His first films are "Men", " Viva, Zapata!", "Julius Caesar"," Tram" Desire", and even vulgar" savage " — became a model of emotional depth. This approach to roles still speaks in the works of such different actors as Joaquin Phoenix and johnny Depp. The actor's dedication brought Brando the first " Oscar "for best actor in the film" in the port", in 1955.Keep this bar was always impossible, it is understood and Brando. "Something might excite me," he told Capote a few years later, " but it never lasts more than a few minutes. That's my limit. Sometimes I wonder why I Wake up in the morning."

Soon the same question began to ask themselves fans of Brando. After the tapes "Tea ceremony", "Sayonara", "désiré" Brando lost the support of respected Directors and mad about it, grabbed any role. The last attempt to swim out was his unsuccessful directorial debut - "one-Eyed jacks." "If I had any illusions about being an artist, now it's just a big cold hope, "said Brando, and he was accused of deliberately sabotaging the next film, "Rebellion on the bounty." "6 million dollars down the drain-mutiny Marlon Brando" - this was the title of the article in Saturday Evening Post. The star constantly demanded to rewrite the script. "Producers get what they deserve when they allow a replaying actor, a capricious child to control the filming of an expensive picture," angrily exclaimed Director Lewis Mailstone. Brando and did not think to repent. "You could say I consider my middle age to be the time to send everyone away."

The decade during which Brando sent everyone away was not a commercial success. His personal life became more and more complicated. Brando never voted for monogamy (they even say that in the best times he kept two abortions in his state) and by the early 1970s managed to divorce three times and become the father of sixteen children. Third wife Brando was a Tahitian woman. Like Paul Gauguin, Brando was fascinated by the South seas and bought the Atoll Tetiaroa, walked around the island barefoot, pulling hair into a ponytail and wrapped in a pareo, which was hard to hide become too wide waist. His Hollywood neighbor (and only friend) Jack Nicholson told me that in his absence, Brando came to him and emptied his refrigerator.

Roles played in the 1970s, revived the legend of Brando. Mario Puzo, the author of "the Godfather", wrote to Corleone, imagining Brando, and the one who desperately wanted to get this role, agreed to play it for 50 thousand dollars and did not spare himself during the filming — stuffed in his mouth paper napkins, smeared his hair with wax and blown away inside his own skin, like a pierced balloon.

Not everyone was thrilled, but in 73-m Brando received a second "Oscar" for best actor. More precisely, he sent to the ceremony Sachin "Little Feather". She, dressed in the formal attire of the Apache tribe, refused the award in protest of Brando against how the Indians were portrayed in movies and on TV. The trick was met with icy silence. In the same year, Brando appeared naked in" the Last tango in Paris " in the role of suffering widower indulging in fits of joyless sex with a young woman. "I felt like I defiled something most sacred in itself, he said about this role. "And I don't want to suffer that anymore."

He didn't suffer like that anymore — at least not in the movies. "Apocalypse now" contributed to the thickening of the giant shadow cast by Brando himself and his murderous Colonel Kurz. Now in open Brando the door rushed a new generation actors. The last two decades of his life have passed among the vulgar (though highly paid) cameos and personal tragedies (his son Christian shot his sister's fiancé Cheyenne, and Cheyenne ten years later committed suicide). "Too much success can destroy you just like too much failure," Brando once prophetically said. When he died of respiratory failure in 2004, Nicholson said, " now everyone will have to raise the bar for themselves."