FOR MORE than two decades he has worked fleetingly in foolish or misguided projects he has seemed intent

FOR MORE than two decades he has worked fleetingly in foolish or misguided projects; he has seemed intent on banking the maximum money for the least but most insolent effort; he has gathered in nets full of squalid press about acrimonious divorces, melodramatic love affairs and the disasters that have befallen his children. He has mocked and defaced his own reputation and the very idea of being a movie star. He has also, in his 71st year, grown famously fat – larger than Orson Welles, some say. Yet most people would still award Marlon Brando a high place on the shortlist of greatest living actors. The few people left who remember his last big stage performance – as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in 1947 – lament the loss of one of the best endowed actors of the century. What happened to Marlon Bran do? Why has he denied himself?
Now we have some gesture towards an answer from the ‘wreck’ himself. His son was charged in 1990 with killing the lover who was beating his half-sister, Cheyenne The stricken Marlon needed money for lawyers in a hurry.

So he said he would write his autobiography, and eventually (for not everyone took his earnest literary intentions on trust) he got Harry Evans, publisher-in-chief of Random House, to put up serious money.Time passed, and apparently not much writing was done.

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Then he found a helper, Robert Lindsey (who had collaborated with Ronald Reagan on his autobiography), and he talked for many hours into a tape recorder. The edited result, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, is just being published in America. It includes a passage where the chronically surly and provocative Brando surmises that he and Random House are just different kinds of hooker – ‘I’ve made stupid movies because I wanted the money. I’m writing this book for money because Harry Evans of Random House offered it to me’. So, screw us, if we feel like reading it.The book is not very good, and it is outrageously incomplete: Brando omits wives and children, and his many lovers are given pseudonyms if they are still alive.

And the people who have been appalled over the years at Brando’s ways of working might find his account of some productions hilariously serene. But that joke at his publisher’s expense gives a clue to Brando’s nature: he is rebellious way beyond the point of destruction, and there are few things for which he has more mixed feelings than acting. His glory has been his curse.MARLON BRANDO was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on 3 April 1924 The name may sound Latin, but the ancestry was mainly Irish. The father, Marlon Brando Snr, a successful agricultural feed dealer, was an aggressive, mean-spirited womaniser; the mother, Dorothy, was a would-be actress, too weak to make her way or to decide on giving up her husband Both were drunks. Brando’s account of his childhood is by far the best part of his book, filled with pain and cocky defiance. It is a plausible case-history of a youth who grew up feeling unloved, desperate to challenge any strong man, and to exploit every woman drawn to him. That may be amateur psychology, but it is the level at which Brando thinks; he has had years of analysis, and was raised in the Stella Adler acting school (a part of the famous Method) that believed in the actor using a role to explore his own experience of life.This may have been the worst training Brando could have had, for it played into his weaknesses.