R.I.P.

Marlon Brando

April 3, 1924 - July 1, 2004

NYTimes (AP)
Washington Post
filmography at WP
The Scotsman
Reuters
Time 100 profile from 2000
Ebert review of The Freshman (which I have a soft spot for)

UPDATED: Terry has posted some very provocative and intriguing thoughts about Marlon Brando, augmented by the further thoughts of Sarah Weinman.

My own take: I have a soft spot for certain bits of Brando's ouevre. Mainly those I saw when I was a teenager, and mainly because they were some of the first "old movies" I ever saw. But.

Then you grow up and see him wearing a big (emphasis on big) white sheet in The Island of Doctor Moreau and that image is tarnished forever. There is a perversity to Brando that is maybe what still makes him interesting. A laxity. A latent need to retreat into those folds of skin and disappear. He always seemed a little like a ghost wearing a borrowed outfit. I'll never forget my first encounter, on audio book, with Truman Capote's New Yorker profile of him, "The Duke in His Domain" (wish it was linkable). The interviews were conducted in Japan, while Capote was on scene during the filming of Sayonara. Brando seemed remarkably odd, but in a banal way, at least as painted there. There's lots of prescient fussing by Brando about what he should eat and shouldn't, and admissions that he's trying to lose weight. Capote's eye is keen as a microscope and the piece ultimately left me feeling very sad, because the absent ending had been filled in. I guess that's not really true; I guess it was only just filled in now.

In any event, I'll take the slightly twinkly appropriately hammy Brando from The Freshman over the others, the one I glommed onto as a teenager and the repulsive later incarnations, and that will be my memory of him. Genius? No. That was the iguana.

worm "Mona Lisa," Nat King Cole