Elgy Gillespie: Shout it out - “Stella!”

Every Mardi Gras New Orleans throws a "Stella and Stanley" shout-out across Jackson Square in the French Quarter. It honours local boy Tennessee Williams and his A Streetcar Named Desire.

The movie version is notorious for the scene where Stanley, Marlon Brando in a tight white vest, yells “Stella-a-a-a-a-!” up the tenement stairs to his wife, so memorably that Brando never needed to act again (except, he said, for the money).

“Stella” might be the most repeated movie line ever, including “Rosebud.” To his later disgust, Marlon Brando’s indelibility and fate was sealed with “Stella!”.

He died an ailing recluse in 2004 but I've been revisiting all those scenes in his mind, thanks to the new documentary Listen To Me, Marlon. Initiated by his children, it's a diary of his life edited from never-before-released tapes, and it leaves nothing out.

It begins with his spookily digitised face, then segues into the fallout of the murder of his daughter’s fiancé by his son at their 12900 Mulholland Drive home.

“Misery has come to my house,” he tells the tabloids and we believe him. His Tahitian home-movie footage with his daughter Cheyenne singing in nursery French are tinged with the foreknowledge she took her life. It’s almost too sad to watch.

Listen To Me owes its genesis to his daughter Rebecca and a Yorkshire-born filmmaker called Stevan Riley. Sitting side by side in those La-Z-Boy recliners currently popular in art-house cinemas, with arm trays for cocktails and appetizers, they're an approachable pair. Rebecca's affection for her father is obvious and suffuses the project.

“It began when all of us children got together on the 10th anniversary of his passing,” she explains. “All” means nine, conservatively.

One of Brando’s quirks, along with not learning lines, was to shove his working life out of sight, because he hated it. “So we decided to look for his tapes. We emptied all the drawers and cabinets and the sheds, and in the end we had this giant jumble of tapes.”

There were more than 300 hours to edit, with home movies of the children, and footage of tragic Cheyenne in particular.

Movita

A respected medical psychotherapist, Rebecca possesses the matriarchal calm and dark, slender beauty that always appealed to her father – a man who loved brunettes, and indeed most women.

She was his oldest daughter by Mexican film star Movita. Imagine! How my father’s generation trembled with emotion whenever Movita’s name came up, usually in tandem with her ex-husband, Irish boxer Jack Doyle.

The movie title comes from Brando's efforts at self-hypnosis, she says. He tells us how acting felt, from how he much loathed Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, to having no script for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, how he and Coppola had to scribble dialogue on the spot (here Coppola protests).

"Actors are not going to be real. They're going to be inside a computer soon," Brando says in response to the image of his digitised head speaking from Macbeth that opens the movie. "Maybe it's a swansong for all of us. "

“Were we surprised?” Rebecca was, a little bit, she says. “Well, we were surprised Marlon was so into technology. We discovered state-of-the-art microphones and every kind of recording machine and computers.”

Brando bought one of the first computers in Hollywood.

The real man suffered endlessly from being confused with his own creations, an outcome of Method acting that Stanislavski may not have foreseen, and explains his contempt for his art.

Idealist

The Mulholland Drive interior had to be recreated on studio lots for a couple of scenes. In reality this house of tragedy was sold and demolished after Brando’s 2004 death.

His Tahitian island is advertised online as “a Godfather of a resort.” But the subtext of this poignant portrayal is that Brando – always the idealist and crusader – never recovered from the tragedies of Christian and Cheyenne. Under-parented himself (womanising father, alcoholic mother) he tried to be conscientious parent to all but finally blamed himself and his livelihood.

“What we wanted to do was show the real man,” Rebecca says. “What he was really like. Not the actor people thought they knew but didn’t. The real human being.”

Spoken like a true and faithful daughter.