Marlon Brando 1924 - 2004

MARLON BRANDO, the reclusive Oscar-winning actor who was one of the most influential stage and screen performers of his generation, has died aged 80, associates said yesterday.

The cause of death was not immediately known. Reports citing family friends and Brando’s lawyer said he died at a Los Angeles area hospital on Thursday. His agents, citing his long-held desire for privacy, confirmed his death but declined to give details.

With his broken nose and rebellious nature, Brando established a more naturalistic style of acting and defined American machismo for a generation with classic performances in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Wild One (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954).

Director Francis Ford Coppola said: “Marlon would hate the idea of people chiming in to give their comments about his death. All I’ll say is that it makes me sad he’s gone.”

To many, Brando remained the motorcycle-riding rebel he played in The Wild One. Asked what he was rebelling against, Brando replied: “Whaddya got?”

Brando won an Academy Award for On the Waterfront and another for his brooding, at times mumbling, portrayal of the patriarch of a Mafia family in The Godfather (1972).

But Brando also railed against Hollywood and chafed at the pomp of stardom throughout a stormy career.

In more recent years, Brando’s brilliance as an actor was overshadowed by his eccentric reclusion, the turmoil in his family life and financial disputes.

Christian, his son by his first wife, Welsh actress Anna Kashfi, served five years in prison for the 1990 murder of his half-sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend. Cheyenne later committed suicide, in 1995, at the age of 25.

Brando remained enmeshed in legal disputes over money up until his final weeks.

He said he only made movies for the money.

“Acting is an empty and useless profession,” he said.

Still, Brando inspired a generation of rebel actors.

“There was a sense of excitement, of danger in his presence, but perhaps his special appeal was in a kind of simple conceit, the conceit of tough kids,” wrote critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker. “Brando represented a contemporary version of the free American.”

Brando was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a calcium carbonate salesman and an actress who coached a local drama group. He was sent to a Minnesota military academy but was soon expelled.

He headed to New York, where he took up drama, studying with famed teacher Stella Adler and the Actors’ Studio.

“Marlon never really had to learn how to act. He knew,” Adler said. “Right from the start he was a universal actor. Nothing human was foreign to him.”

Brando was married three times, choosing little-known actresses as his brides - Kashfi, Mexican actress Movita Castenada, and Tahitian Tarita Teriipia, who co-starred with him in Mutiny on the Bounty.

“He’s full of hostilities, longings, feelings of distrust,” director Elia Kazan once said, “But his outer front is gentle and nice.”