Marlon Brando

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3, 1924, Marlon Brando, Jr.’s childhood was marked by his mother’s addiction to alcohol, a failed actress who died prematurely. “It was everything to me, but when I came back from school there was no one there, the fridge was empty, and the phone was ringing. He was someone calling from some bar and saying, ‘We’ve got a woman here you better come pick up.’ One day I couldn’t take it anymore and I stopped caring,” the actor commented in an interview. His father also hit the bottle, mistreated the young Brando and eventually sent him to a military academy. To escape from his mother, Brando emigrates to New York, where he gets a job as an actor on Broadway, and later enrolls in the Actor’s Studio, a school specializing in training method actors. He made his film debut withMen , after which Elia Kazan , one of the founders of the aforementioned school, recruited him to star in A Streetcar Named Desire , which shocked the audience. “I still meet people who first think of me as a tough, callous, rugged guy named Stanley Kowalski,” Brando would write in his autobiography. Just as exceptional are his works in ¡Viva Zapata! , Julius Caesar , Savage and The Law of Silence , for which he would receive his first Oscar.

In the late 50s and 60s, Brando did not stop accumulating important titles, such as Dance of the Damned , Mutiny on the Bounty , The Human Pack and Reflections in a Golden Eye . He even made his directorial debut with The Impenetrable Face , but his experience left him exhausted. “You kill yourself working,” he said. During the filming of Mutiny on board , he fell in love with Tarita, the actress who played the Tahitian fascinated with her character, and made her her wife, although it was the third time he had married, as it was difficult for him to find stability. .

In the 70s, Brando distinguished himself by choosing his works with a dropper. He had great success with the Last Tango in Paris scandal , had a bit role in Superman and wowed with his incredible transformation into Vito Corleone, star of The Godfather , for which he received a second Oscar that he did not go to collect. In his place he sent an Indian who took advantage of the speech to claim the rights of Native Americans. With the film’s director, Coppola, he reprized as Colonel Kurt in the brilliant Apocalypse Now .

Despite this unrivaled professional career, Brando had a hard time in his personal life. Christian, the most troubled of his nine children, had problems with alcohol and drugs, and was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison for murdering his sister’s Cheyenne boyfriend. The latter blamed her father for the event and finally committed suicide.

In his last years of life, Brando barely made public appearances, and suffered from depressions that led him to overeat and suffer from exaggerated obesity that made him almost unrecognizable. According to a recent biography, he was broke, and that is why he agreed to return to the cinema from time to time, in films like Don Juan de Marco and The Score (A Masterstroke) , his last work. Pulmonary fibrosis ended his life on July 1, 2004.