BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS ARIES: MARLON BRANDO

Actor. Born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. Brando studied in New-York with acting coach Stella Adler and at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio. He made his Broadway debut in I Remember Mama (1944). New York theater critics voted him Broadway's Most Promising Actor for his performance in Truckline Café (1946). In 1947, he played his greatest stage role, Stanley Kowalski—the brute who rapes his sister-in-law, the fragile Blanche du Bois—in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

Hollywood beckoned to Brando, and he made his debut as a paraplegic World War II veteran in The Men (1950). Although he did not cooperate with the Hollywood publicity machine, he went on to play Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, a popular and critical success that earned four Academy Awards. His next movie, Viva Zapata! (1952), with a script by John Steinbeck, traces Emiliano Zapata's rise from peasant to revolutionary to president of Mexico. Brando followed that with Julius Caesar and then The Wild One (1954), in which he played a motorcycle-gang leader in all his leather-jacketed glory. Next came his Academy Award-winning role as a longshoreman fighting the system in On the Waterfront, a hard-hitting look at New York City labor unions.

During the rest of the decade, Brando's screen roles ranged from Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée (1954), to Sky Masterson in 1955's Guys and Dolls, in which he sang and danced, to a Nazi soldier in The Young Lions (1958). Brando's career was reborn in 1972 with his depiction of Mafioso Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, a role for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. He turned down the Oscar, however, in protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. Brando himself did not appear at the awards show. Instead, he sent a Native American Apache named Sacheen Littlefeather (who was later determined to be an actress portraying a Native American) to decline the award on his behalf.

Brando proceeded the following year to the highly controversial yet highly acclaimed Last Tango in Paris, which was rated X. Since then, Brando has received huge salaries for playing small parts in such movies as Superman (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979).