Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, United States on April 3, 1924. His father was a salesman and his mother an actress. He did poorly in school. He was most interested in sports and dramas. His father sent him to a military school to control him and taught him some discipline when he was seventeen years old. He studied there for almost three years, but was expelled in his senior year because he didn't respect authority and created so much trouble and due to this reason he could not graduated from high school. He left the school and returned to his family. Thereafter he moved to New York, where one of his sisters was strugling to become an actress. He enrolled in Actors' Studio and began to study with the famous acting coach Stella Adler. There he learned the "method approach", in which actors are trained to draw on their own personal emotions and experiences as a way to play their characters. He made his Broadway debut in "I Remember Mama" in 1944. The New York theater critics voted him Broadway's Most Promising Actor for his performance in 1946. In 1947, he played his briliant stage role, Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's drama "A Streetcar Named Desire". Before James Dean he popularized the Jeans and T-shirt look, as a movie idol in 1950s. Hollywood producers were impressed with him and in 1950; he made his motion picture debut as a injured war veteran in "The Men". In 1951, he played as Stanley Kowalski in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. The movie was a critical success. He played a variety of different characters in the next several years. In 1952, his movie Viva Zapata was released in which he played as Emiliano Zapata, a poor farmer who become the president of Mexico. He played as Marc Antony in the film version of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1953). He appeared as a motorcyclegang leader in The Wild One in 1954 and also portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Desiree in the same year. He sang and danced as Sky Masterson in the musical comedy Guys and Dolls in 1955. He won his first Academy Award in 1954 for his role in On the Water-front, a hard-hitting look at New York City labor unions. He remained one of the top ten film attractions from 1955 to 1958. In 1962, he did Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio's Mutiny on the Bounty, which was a disaster at the box office and could not earn even half of its enormous budget. For the rest of the 1960s Brando acted in several movies, but none of them was considered to be of very high quality. In 1972, he portrayed Mafia leader Don Corleone in The Godfather. He won his second Oscar for that role, but he refused to accept it because of how he felt Hollywood showed Native Americans in its movies. In 1994, he changed his mind and tried to get the gold Oscar statuette, but his request was denied. He continued to work in many films after The Godfather, both as a star and in smaller roles in dramas and comedies. He died on July 1, 2004 in Westwood, California, United States.