Age, Biography, and Wiki
Marlon Brando Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. He passed away on July 1, 2004, at the age of 80. Brando is widely regarded as one of the greatest actors in cinema history, known for his powerful performances and unique acting style.
| Occupation | Stage Actor |
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| Date of Birth | 3 April 1924 |
| Age | 101 Years |
| Birth Place | Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Aries |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 1 July, 2004 |
| Died Place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is no specific mention of Brando's exact height and weight in the available search results. However, he was known for his robust physique, which was often highlighted in his roles.
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Dating & Relationship status
Marlon Brando's personal life was complex and included multiple marriages and relationships. He was married three times and had numerous children. His relationships were often tumultuous and garnered significant media attention.
Marlon Brando Jr. and Dorothy Pennebaker. His father was a salesman who often travelled out-of-state and his mother was a stage actress, often away from home. His mother's absence resulted in Brando becoming attached to the family's housekeeper, who eventually left to get married, causing Brando to develop abandonment issues. His two elder sisters were Jocelyn and Frances.
In 1930, when Brando was only six years old, the family moved to Evanston, Illinois, where Brando mimicked other people, developed a reputation for pranking, and met Wally Cox, with whom he remained friends until Cox's death in 1973. In 1936, his parents separated and he and his siblings moved with their mother to Santa Ana, California. Two years later, his parents reconciled, and his father purchased a farmhouse in Libertyville, Illinois. Brando attended Libertyville High School, excelling at sports and drama, but failing in every other subject. Consequently, he was held back for a year, and with his history of misbehaving, he was expelled in 1941.
Brando was sent by his father to Shattuck Military Academy, where his father had also studied. There, Brando continued to excel at acting until 1943, when he was put on probation for being insubordinate to an officer during maneuvers. He was confined to the campus, but sneaked into town and was caught. The faculty voted to expel him, although he was supported by the students who thought expulsion was too harsh. Brando was invited back for the following year, but decided instead to drop out of high school. He then worked as a ditch-digger at a summer job arranged by his father and tried to enlist in the Army, but his routine physical revealed that a football injury he had sustained at Shattuck had left him with a trick knee; he was classified physically unfit for military service.
Brando used his Stanislavski System skills for his first summer stock roles in Sayville, New York, on Long Island. Brando established a pattern of erratic, insubordinate behavior in the few shows he had been in. His behavior had him kicked out of the cast of the New School's production in Sayville, but he was soon afterwards discovered in a locally produced play there. Then, in 1944, he made it to Broadway in the bittersweet drama I Remember Mama, playing the son of Mady Christians. The Lunts wanted Brando to play the role of Alfred Lunt's son in O Mistress Mine, and Lunt even coached him for the audition, but Brando made no attempt to even read his lines at the audition and was not hired. New York Drama Critics voted him "Most Promising Young Actor" for his role as an anguished veteran in Truckline Café, although the play was a commercial failure. In 1946, he appeared on Broadway as the young hero in the political drama A Flag is Born, refusing to accept wages above the Actors' Equity rate. In that same year, Brando played the role of Marchbanks alongside Katharine Cornell in her production's revival of Candida, one of her signature roles. Cornell also cast him as the Messenger in her production of Jean Anouilh's Antigone that same year. He was also offered the opportunity to portray one of the principal characters in the Broadway premiere of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, but turned the part down after falling asleep while trying to read the massive script and pronouncing the play "ineptly written and poorly constructed". In 1945, Brando's agent recommended he take a co-starring role in The Eagle Has Two Heads with Tallulah Bankhead, produced by Jack Wilson. Bankhead had turned down the role of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, which Williams had written for her, to tour the play for the 1946–1947 season. Bankhead recognized Brando's potential, despite her disdain (which most Broadway veterans shared) for method acting, and agreed to hire him even though he auditioned poorly. The two clashed greatly during the pre-Broadway tour, with Bankhead reminding Brando of his mother, being her age and also having a drinking problem. Wilson was largely tolerant of Brando's behavior, but he reached his limit when Brando mumbled through a dress rehearsal shortly before the November 28, 1946, opening. "I don't care what your grandmother did," Wilson exclaimed, "and that Method stuff, I want to know what you're going to do!" Brando in turn raised his voice, and acted with great power and passion. "It was marvelous," a cast member recalled. "Everybody hugged him and kissed him. He came ambling offstage and said to me, 'They don't think you can act unless you can yell.'"
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| Husband | Anna Kashfi (m. 1957-1959) Movita Castaneda (m. 1960-1968) Tarita Teriipaia (m. 1962-1972) |
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Net Worth and Salary
At the time of his death, Marlon Brando's net worth was estimated to be around $100 million, which is equivalent to approximately $130 million today when adjusted for inflation. His estate continues to earn substantial income from licensing deals and royalties, reportedly around $9 million annually.
Business and Investments
Brando invested in real estate, owning several properties, including a private island in French Polynesia. His lavish spending and sometimes tumultuous relationship with money led to financial ups and downs throughout his life.
Marlon Brando Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American actor. Widely regarded as one of the greatest cinema actors of the 20th century, Brando received numerous accolades throughout his career, which spanned six decades, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, a Cannes Film Festival Award, three British Academy Film Awards, and an Emmy Award. Brando is credited with being one of the first actors to bring the Stanislavski system of acting and method acting to mainstream audiences.
Brando came under the influence of Stella Adler and Stanislavski's system in the 1940s. He began his career on stage, where he was lauded for adeptly interpreting his characters. He made his Broadway debut in the play I Remember Mama (1944) and won Theater World Awards for his roles in the plays Candida and Truckline Cafe, both in 1946. He returned to Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a role he reprised in the 1951 film adaptation, directed by Elia Kazan.
Brando displayed his apathy for the production by demonstrating some shocking onstage manners. He "tried everything in the world to ruin it for her," Bankhead's stage manager claimed. "He nearly drove her crazy: scratching his crotch, picking his nose, doing anything." After several weeks on the road, they reached Boston, by which time Bankhead was ready to dismiss him. This proved to be one of the greatest blessings of his career, as it freed him up to play the role of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Elia Kazan. Moreover, to that end, Bankhead herself, in her letter declining Williams' invitation to play the role of Blanche, gave Brando this ringing—albeit acid-tongued—endorsement stating "I do have one suggestion for casting. I know of an actor who can appear as this brutish Stanley Kowalski character. I mean, a total pig of a man without sensitivity or grace of any kind. Marlon Brando would be perfect as Stanley. I have just fired the cad from my play, The Eagle Has Two Heads, and I know for a fact that he is looking for work".
Early in his career, Brando began using cue cards instead of memorizing his lines. Despite the objections of several of the film directors he worked with, Brando felt that this helped bring realism and spontaneity to his performances. He felt otherwise he would appear to be reciting a writer's speech. In the TV documentary The Making of Superman: The Movie, Brando explained: "If you don't know what the words are but you have a general idea of what they are, then you look at the cue card and it gives you the feeling to the viewer, hopefully, that the person is really searching for what he is going to say—that he doesn't know what to say". Some, however, thought Brando used the cards out of laziness or an inability to memorize his lines. Once, on the set of The Godfather, Brando was asked why he wanted his lines printed out. He responded: "Because I can read them that way."
Social Network
Although Marlon Brando is no longer active in social media, his legacy continues to be celebrated and shared by fans worldwide.
Brando was an avid student and proponent of Stella Adler, from whom he learned the techniques of the Stanislavski system. This technique encouraged the actor to explore both internal and external aspects to fully realize the character being portrayed. Brando's remarkable insight and sense of realism were evident early on. Adler used to recount that, when teaching Brando, she had instructed the class to act like chickens, and added that a nuclear bomb was about to fall on them. Most of the class clucked and ran around wildly, but Brando sat calmly and pretended to lay an egg. Asked by Adler why he had chosen to react this way, he said, "I'm a chicken—what do I know about bombs?" Despite being commonly regarded as a method actor, Brando disagreed. He claimed to have abhorred Lee Strasberg's teachings:
Brando was the first to bring a natural approach to acting on film. According to Dustin Hoffman in his online Masterclass, Brando would often talk to cameramen and fellow actors about their weekend even after the director would call action. Once Brando felt he could deliver the dialogue as naturally as that conversation, he would start the dialogue. In his 2015 documentary, Listen To Me Marlon, he said that prior to that, actors were like breakfast cereals, meaning they were predictable. Critics would later say that this was Brando being difficult, but actors who worked opposite him said it was just all part of his technique.
Critics were not as kind, however. A review of Brando's performance in the opening assessed that Brando was "still building his character, but at present fails to impress." One Boston critic remarked of Brando's prolonged death scene, "Brando looked like a car in midtown Manhattan searching for a parking space." He received better reviews at subsequent tour stops, but what his colleagues recalled was only occasional indications of the talent he would later demonstrate. "There were a few times when he was really magnificent," Bankhead admitted to an interviewer in 1962. "He was a great young actor when he wanted to be, but most of the time I couldn't even hear him on the stage."
Kanfer adds that after a screening of the film, director John Huston commented: "Christ! It was like a furnace door opening—the heat came off the screen. I don't know another actor who could do that." During the filming of Julius Caesar, Brando learned that Elia Kazan had cooperated with congressional investigators, naming a whole string of "subversives" to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). By all accounts, Brando was upset by his mentor's decision, but he worked with him again in On The Waterfront. "None of us is perfect," he later wrote in his memoir, "and I think that Gadg has done injury to others, but mostly to himself."
Education
Marlon Brando did not complete high school. He attended Libertyville High School but was expelled. He later trained at the Actors Studio in New York City, where he honed his acting skills.
Despite lacking formal education, Brando became one of the most influential actors of his time, leaving behind a lasting legacy in the film industry.
Brando decided to follow his sisters to New York, studying at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, part of the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, with influential German director Erwin Piscator. In a 1988 documentary, Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Brando's sister Jocelyn remembered, "He was in a school play and enjoyed it ... So he decided he would go to New York and study acting because that was the only thing he had enjoyed. That was when he was 18." In the A&E Biography episode on Brando, George Englund said Brando fell into acting in New York because "he was accepted there. He wasn't criticized. It was the first time in his life that he heard good things about himself." He spent his first few months in New York sleeping on friends' couches. For a time he lived with Roy Somlyo, who later became a four-time Emmy-winning Broadway producer.
In 1947, Brando performed a screen test for an early Warner Brothers script for the novel Rebel Without a Cause (1944), which bore no relation to the film eventually produced in 1955. The screen test is included as an extra in the 2006 DVD release of A Streetcar Named Desire. Brando's first screen role was a bitter paraplegic veteran in The Men (1950). He spent a month in bed at the Birmingham Army Hospital in Van Nuys to prepare for the role. The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther wrote that Brando as Ken "is so vividly real, dynamic and sensitive that his illusion is complete" and noted, "Out of stiff and frozen silences he can lash into a passionate rage with the tearful and flailing frenzy of a taut cable suddenly cut."
By Brando's own account, it may have been because of this film that his draft status was changed from 4-F to 1-A. He had had surgery on his trick knee, and it was no longer physically debilitating enough to incur exclusion from the draft. When Brando reported to the induction center, he answered a questionnaire by saying his race was "human", his color was "Seasonal-oyster white to beige", and he told an Army doctor that he was psychoneurotic. When the draft board referred him to a psychiatrist, Brando explained that he had been expelled from military school and had severe problems with authority. Coincidentally, the psychiatrist knew a doctor friend of Brando. Brando avoided military service during the Korean War.
He was also nominated the next year for Viva Zapata! (1952), a fictionalized account of the life of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. The film recounted Zapata's lower-class upbringing, his rise to power in the early 20th century, and death. The film was directed by Elia Kazan and co-starred Anthony Quinn.
