BIOGRAPHY:A new biography takes a cool, restrained look at the iconic star who changed screen acting forever with some of cinema's strongest performances Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando By Stefan Kanfer Faber 323pp. £20
ON THE LANDSCAPE of 20th-century culture, there can be few more potent figures than that of Marlon Brando. Looming large - as he did so often in his films - out of the dark shadows, Brando has always been much more than an actor. He is an uneasy presence, a popular icon, a shape-changer extraordinaire. For Marlon Brando didn't just play a character, he was that character.
In a profession where lines of dialogue are hoarded like gold, Brando exhibited a total disregard for his. Often, and much to the frustration of his director and fellow actors, he would turn up on a film-set without any of the dialogue committed to memory. Inevitably, Marlon Brando was forever throwing out the script and re-writing his part, forging his own complex and enigmatic character right down through some of the finest (and some of the worst) films of modern cinema: A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, The Godfather and Last Tango In Paris to name but a few. Whether this makes him one of the greatest actors of our time or a disturbed egomaniac remains a moot point.
Either way, as Stefan Kanfer ably demonstrates in this measured and authoritative account, Brando's portrayal of inarticulate rebellion and wounded masculinity was to have a profound influence on the generations to follow him. Emerging out of the bleak Midwest of the Great Depression, via Shattuck Military Academy, into the jazz-infused New York of the 1940s, Brando found himself in Greenwich Village at the Drama Department of the New School for Social Research. There, under the radical German theatre director Erwin Piscator, and later with Stella Adler, this handsome, if feckless, youth absorbed the teachings of the legendary Konstantin Stanislavski of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Stanislavski's intense pursuit of a kind of emotional inner truth became known as "The Method" and this oft-maligned and frequently misunderstood approach imbued cinema with a new realism that would alter screen-acting forever. The young actor absorbed its essence, and, although he constantly questioned the value of acting throughout his life, Marlon Brando would become the poster boy for generations of actors to come. Wittingly or unwittingly, James Dean, Paul Newman, Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Penn owe much to Brando's legacy. And, in changing how male emotions were portrayed on celluloid, Brando somehow changed how men - and American men, in particular - saw themselves. Marlon Brando, in mythologising and immortalising his own inner life, allowed us to acknowledge and express our own.
Among his many insatiable appetites, the pursuit of sultry beauties was central and his description of his chosen method of seduction could be read as a manifesto for his new style of acting: "I circle around and around. Then, gradually, I come nearer. Then I reach out and touch them - ah, so gently. Then I draw back. Wait awhile. Make them wonder. At just the right moment, I move in again. Touch them. Circle. They don't know what's happening. Before they realise it, they're all entangled, involved. I have them. And suddenly, sometimes, I'm all they have".
BRANDO BIOGRAPHIES are mostly 10-a-penny trash but Kanfer's book is a notable and worthy exception. He is studiously meticulous in chronicling what he terms this "reckless life and remarkable career". The book gives a kind of clarity and substance to the tall tales and newspaper headlines that have seeped, as if by osmosis, into public consciousness. Stories that we all feel we know: his smouldering beauty and wild excess. The iconic roles and the diffident actor. Those torn vests and tight tuxedos. The sexual ambiguities and perceived immoralities. His many wives and exotic lovers. The lost and lonely children. The retreat to the Polynesian Islands, a garland of flowers around his neck. Impending financial ruin. The Native American Indian squaw making a dignified political statement while receiving an Oscar on his behalf. (Interestingly, Brando's much-vaunted social consciousness comes across as rather misplaced and often misguided.)
Finally and inevitably, there are the heart-breaking family tragedies and court-room dramas. Dysfunctional minds and bloated bodies. To all of this, Stefan Kanfer brings a cool perspective and clear-sighted context. Yet, while admiring the author's restraint, one is left yearning for just a little more interpretation, perhaps some gentle reflection on the heady narrative unfolding before you on the page.
Strangely, and appropriately, it is the publicly reticent and sometimes dissembling Brando who provides the brief slivers of insight into his personal drama in his own memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me. At one point, he recalls a dream he had following the death of his father in the spring of 1965. As Marlon Senior walked out into the blue yonder of eternity, Brando pictured him in his mind's eye: "He stopped and looked back again, turned halfway toward me and, with his eyes downcast, said: 'I did the best I could, kid'". Twenty-five years later, with a director's eye and an actor's ear, "I did the best I could" were the last words of Marlon Junior's moving testimony at the trial of his own son Christian for murder.
Marlon Brando's life, like Stefan Kanfer's biography, has a dizzy, unstoppable momentum and the reader reaches the end exhausted. Brando's inevitable and somewhat tragic death comes as both a relief and, curiously, a surprise. In his last months, the aging Don took refuge on occasion in Michael Jackson's Neverland mansion outside Santa Barbara. It is tempting to imagine that if Elvis Presley was really still alive he must surely have joined them both there in this mythical way station. Far more difficult to imagine is what they might have talked about, but one would certainly hope that they found some small comfort together.
In what many people view as his cinematic swansong, Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz, the renegade Special Forces officer lost deep in the heart of darkness, says: "You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to judge me".
Marlon Brando lives so vividly in our memories and in our movies that it would certainly be very tough to kill him. But he is, undoubtedly, much easier to judge and Stefan Kanfer, to his eternal credit, resists that temptation.
Alan Gilsenan is a film-maker and theatre director