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" Marlon Brando Biography"

Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an Oscar-winning American actor who is widely regarded as one of the greatest film actors of the 20th century. He brought the techniques of method acting to prominence in the films A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. His acting style, combined with his public persona as an outsider uninterested in the Hollywood of the early 1950s, had a profound effect on a generation of actors that would come after him. Brando was also an activist, lending his presence to many issues, including the American Indian Movement.
Brando was born to Marlon Brando Sr. (1895–1965) and Dorothy Pennebaker Brando (1897-1954) in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1935, when he was 11 years old, his parents separated. His mother briefly took her three children to live with her mother in Santa Ana, California, until 1937 when the parents reconciled and moved to Libertyville, Illinois, a village northwest of Chicago. The family were of primarily Dutch, Irish, German, and English stock. Although Brando claimed his grandfather was a Frenchman, Eugene Brandeaux (and this was repeated by some biographers), this was in fact incorrect , his grandparents being in fact Eugene Brando and Marie Holloway, who abandoned her husband and child when Brando's father was five years old. The Brando family had been long settled in New York state, being earlier spelled Brandow and originating with a German immigrant Johann Wilhelm Brandau who settled in America in the early 1700s. Brando's mother was a kind and talented woman, although she suffered from alcoholism and was frequently absent in Brando's childhood. She was involved in local theater and helped a young Henry Fonda to begin his own acting career, and fueled Brando's interest in stage acting. Brando was a gifted mimic from early childhood and developed a rare ability to absorb the tics and mannerisms of people he played and to display those traits dramatically while staying in character. His elder sister, Jocelyn Brando, was also an actress.
Brando had a tumultuous childhood. He was held back a year in school and was later expelled from Libertyville High School. At the age of 16, he was sent to Shattuck Military Academy in Fairbault, Minnesota where his father had gone before him. At Shattuck, he excelled at theater and got along well within the structure of the school. In his final year (1943), he was put on probation for talking back to an officer during maneuvers. A part of his probation was that he be confined to the school campus. But he eventually tried sneaking off campus into town and was caught. The faculty voted to expell him. He received support from his fellow students who thought the punishment too harsh. He was later invited back for the next year, but decided not to finish school.
He worked as a ditch-digger in his hometown as a summer job arranged by his father. But he had decided to follow his sisters to New York. One sister was trying to be a painter and the other had already appeared on Broadway. He had actually visited his sister Frances in New York at Christmas 1942 and liked the experience. Brando was given six months of support from his father, after which his father offered to help him get a job as a salesman. Brando left Illinois for New York City, where he studied at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, New School Dramatic Workshop, and the Actors' Studio. It was at the New School's Dramatic Workshop that he studied with Stella Adler and learned the techniques of the Stanislavski System. Brando had two older sisters: Jocelyn Brando (1919–2005) and Frances Brando (b. 1922).
Brando used his Stanislavski System skills for his first summer-stock roles in Sayville, New York. His behavior got him kicked out of the cast of the New School's production in Sayville, but he was discovered in a locally produced play there and then made it to Broadway in the bittersweet drama I Remember Mama in 1944. Critics voted him "Broadway's Most Promising Actor" for his role as an anguished, paraplegic veteran in Truckline Café, although the play was a commercial failure. He achieved real stardom, however, as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan. Brando sought out that role, driving out to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Williams was spending the summer, to audition for the part. Williams recalled that he opened the screen door and knew, instantly, that he had his Stanley Kowalski.
Afterward, Brando was asked to do a screen test for Warner Brothers studio. The screen test used script fragments from prospective film called Rebel Without a Cause. The title came from a book that Warner Brothers had optioned in 1944. However, the 1947 project had nothing to do with the 1955 film beyond the title just as the 1955 film has nothing to do with the original book beyond the title. The script for Rebel Without a Cause as it appeared on screen was not written until years after the Brando test. Brando turned down a contract offer from Warner Brothers because he did not think the six-year duration of the contract was in his best interests. The screen test appears as an extra in the 2006 DVD release of Streetcar. Brando's first screen role was the bitter crippled veteran in The Men in 1950. True to his method, Brando spent a month in bed at a veterans' hospital to prepare for the role.
He made a much larger impression the following year when he brought his performance as Stanley Kowalski to the screen in Kazan's adaptation of Streetcar in 1951. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for that role, and again in each of the next three years for his roles in Viva Zapata! in 1952, Julius Caesar in 1953 as Marc Antony, and On the Waterfront in 1954. These first six films of Brando's career featured performances of monumental proportions and essentially set a new standard not just for all other actors but also for Brando himself.
In 1953, he also starred in Lee Falk's play Arms and the Man. Falk was proud to tell that Marlon Brando turned down an offer of $10,000 per week to act on Broadway, in favor of working on Falk's play in Boston. His Boston contract was less than $500 per week. It would be the last time he ever acted in a stage play.
Brando became a hero for the younger generation by playing motorcycle rebel Johnny Strabler in the movie The Wild One. He created the rebel image for the rock-and-roll era. Many rockers like Elvis Presley imitated Brando's look and character. Elvis took it to another level by bringing the rebel image to the rock-and-roll fans. Elvis also copied Brando's role as Johnny while playing Vince in his 1957 movie Jailhouse Rock. Marlon Brando was a hero for James Dean, who idolized him and copied his acting and persona. For his role as Jim Stark in his 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean studied Marlon's role as Johnny and took it to a new level. (Marlon Brando's name is even mentioned in the movie.) Director Nick Ray even took the gang image from the movie The Wild One and brought it to this movie and thus emphasized Brando's effect on the youth. All the rebel culture that included motorcycle, leather jackets, jeans and the whole rebel image, that inspired generations of rebels, came thanks to the movie The Wild One and Brando's own unique image and character.
Brando finally won the Oscar for his role of Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront. Under Kazan's direction, and with a talented ensemble around him, Brando used his Stanislavski System training and improvisational skills. Brando claimed that he had improvised much of his dialogue with Rod Steiger in the famous, much-quoted scene with him in the back of a taxicab ("I could have been a contender"). Kazan disputed this. Brando followed that triumph by a variety of roles in the 1950s that defied expectations: as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, where he managed to carry off a singing role; as Sakini, a Japanese interpreter for the U.S. Army in postwar Japan in The Teahouse of the August Moon; as an Air Force officer in Sayonara; and a Nazi officer in The Young Lions. While he won an Oscar nomination for his acting in Sayonara, his acting had lost much of its energy and direction by the end of the 1950s.
Brando's star sank even further in the 1960s as he turned in increasingly uninspired performances in Mutiny on the Bounty and several other forgettable films. Even at this professional low point, though, Brando still managed to produce a few exceptional films, such as One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a western that would be the only film Brando would ever direct; Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), portraying a repressed gay army officer; and Burn! (1969), which Brando would later claim as his personal favorite, although it was a commercial failure. Nonetheless, his career had gone into almost complete eclipse by the end of the decade thanks to his reputation as a difficult star and his record in overbudget or marginal movies.
His performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather in 1972 changed this. Director Francis Ford Coppola convinced Brando to submit to a "make-up" test, in which Brando did his own makeup. Coppola was electrified by Brando's characterization as the head of a crime family, but had to fight the studio in order to cast him. Brando won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance; once again, he improvised important details that lent more humanity to what could otherwise have been a clichéd role. Brando turned down the Academy Award, the second actor to refuse an Oscar (the first being George C. Scott for Patton). Brando boycotted the award ceremony, sending little-known actress Sacheen Littlefeather to state his reasons, which were based on his objections to the depiction of Native Americans by Hollywood and television. The actor followed with one of his greatest performances in Last Tango in Paris, but the performance was overshadowed by an uproar over the erotic nature of the Bernardo Bertolucci film. Despite the controversies which attended both the film and the man, the Academy once again nominated Brando for the Best Actor.
His career afterward was uneven. He gained a great deal of weight around the time he appeared as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. His weight limited him in terms of roles he could play.
Brando became known as much for his crusades for civil rights, Native American rights and other political causes as he was for his acting. He also earned a "bad boy" reputation for his public outbursts and antics. In June 1973, Brando broke paparazzo Ron Galella's jaw. His hand became infected as a result. In the following year, Galella wore a football helmet when snapping photos of Brando.
In his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, Brando claimed he showed up one night at Marilyn Monroe's apartment and they started an affair that lasted many years. He also claimed numerous other romances, although he did not discuss his marriages, his wives, or his children in his autobiography.
In his 1976 biography The Only Contender by Gary Carey, Brando was quoted as saying, "Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed." Photographs circulate on the Internet that appear to confirm this. A 2006 book, Brando Unzipped by Darwin Porter alleges affairs with Rock Hudson and Cary Grant. An alleged long time lover was Wally Cox. Brando is quoted as saying: "If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived happily ever after."  After Cox died, Brando kept his ashes for 30 years, and they were eventually scattered with his own. Cox's third wife only discovered he possessed them after reading an interview in Time where Brando is quoted as saying: "I have Wally's ashes in my house. I talk to him all the time." 
He married actress Anna Kashfi in 1957, mistakenly believing her to be of Asian Indian descent when she was in fact from Wales and of Irish Roman Catholic extraction: Her real name was Joan O'Callaghan. O'Callaghan did not discourage Brando's mistake; in fact, she dressed and made herself up as an Indian beauty after learning that Brando gravitated toward exotic women. They divorced in 1959 after having one son, Christian Brando, together.
In 1960, Brando married Movita Castaneda, a Mexican actress seven years his senior who had appeared in the first Mutiny on the Bounty film in 1935, some 27 years before Brando's own version was released. A remake of Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962, with Brando as Fletcher Christian, seemed to bolster his reputation as a difficult star. He was blamed for a change in directors and a runaway budget, though he disclaimed responsibility for either.
The Bounty experience affected Brando's life in a profound way: He fell in love with Tahiti and its people. He took a 99-year lease on part of an atoll island, Tetiaroa, which he intended to make part environmental laboratory and part resort. Tahitian beauty Tarita Teriipia, who played Fletcher Christian's love interest, became Brando's third wife. A 1961 article on Teriipia in the fan magazine Motion Picture described Brando's delight at how naïve and unsophisticated she was. Teriipia became the mother of two of his children. The hotel on Tetiaroa was eventually built; it went through many redesigns due to changes demanded by Brando over the years, but it is now closed. A new hotel consisting of 30 deluxe villas is due to open in 2008.
All three of Brando's wives were pregnant when he married them. The number of children he had is still in dispute, although he recognized 11 children in his will; they were (ages as given in 2004):

by his marriage to actress Anna Kashfi: 
Christian Brando (46) 
by his marriage to actress Movita Castaneda: 
Miko Brando (43) 
Rebecca Brando Kotlinzky (38) 
by his marriage to Tarita Teriipia: 
Simon Teihotu Brando (43) - the only inhabitant of Tetiaroa 
Cheyenne (committed suicide in 1995 at the age of 25) 
by adoption: 
Petra Brando-Corval (32), daughter of Brando's assistant Caroline Barrett 
Maimiti Brando (28) 
Raiatua Brando (23) 
Brando married his maid Christina Maria Ruiz and had the following children with her:
Ninna Priscilla Brando (born: 1989) 
Myles Brando (born: 1992 as Myles Jonathan Brando) 
Timothy Brando (born: 1994 as Timothy Gahan Brando) 
In May 1990, Christian shot and killed Dag Drollet, the Tahitian lover of Christian's half-sister Cheyenne, at the family's hilltop home above Beverly Hills. Christian, then 31, claimed the shooting was accidental. After a heavily publicized trial, Christian was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and use of a gun. He was sentenced to 10 years. Before the sentencing, Brando delivered an hour of rambling testimony in which he said he and his ex-wife had failed Christian. He commented softly to members of the Drollet family: "I'm sorry... If I could trade places with Dag, I would. I'm prepared for the consequences." Afterward, Drollet's father said he thought Brando was acting and his son was "getting away with murder." The tragedy was compounded in 1995, when Cheyenne, said to still be depressed over Drollet's death, committed suicide by hanging herself in Tahiti at the age of 25. Only months after Marlon Brando's death, Brando's ex-wife Tarita Teriipia wrote her memoires entitled Marlon, My Love and My Torment in which she says that Brando had sexually abused their daughter Cheyenne 
Brando's notoriety, his family's troubled lives, his self-exile from Hollywood, and his obesity attracted more attention than his late acting career. He also earned a reputation for being difficult on the set, often unwilling or unable to memorize his lines and less interested in taking direction than in confronting the film director with odd and childish demands. On the other hand, most other actors found him generous, funny and supportive. Although more and more reclusive in his declining years, Brando was by nature a casual and friendly man.
The actor was a long-time close friend of the entertainer Michael Jackson and paid regular visits to his Neverland Ranch, resting there for weeks. Brando also participated in the singer's solo career 30th anniversary celebration concerts in 2001, as well as starring in his 15-minute-long music video You Rock My World the same year. The actor's son Miko was Jackson's bodyguard for several years, and is also a friend of the singer.
On July 1, 2004, at 6:30 p.m. local time, Brando died at the age of 80. The cause of his death was intentionally withheld, with his lawyer citing privacy concerns. It was later revealed that he died at UCLA Medical Center of respiratory failure brought on by pulmonary fibrosis. He had also been suffering from congestive heart failure and, had also recently been diagnosed with liver cancer. It was revealed in 2006 that Brando had suffered from dementia in the final years of his life.
Brando was cremated and his ashes were scattered in two places. Part of his ashes were scattered in Tahiti and part of his ashes were scattered in Death Valley.

Marlon Brando has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.