Why Marlon Brando called a dog named Tim the greatest actor of all time: “Everybody has their own value”
Most people don’t have any problems with repeatedly being told they’re good at their job, but it would be selling him very short to say that Marlon Brando wasn’t like most people.
Again, a lot of folks would be thrilled to hear they’ve single-handedly revitalised, revolutionised, and redifined their chosen vocation, but not him. Brando fell out of love with acting almost as quickly as he fell in love with it, and he was sick and tired of sycophantic praise being pushed in his direction.
It’s admittedly ironic that in a place like Hollywood, where ego and vanity run rampant, the consensus pick for the single greatest actor in cinema history loathed being called the single greatest actor in cinema history, despite countless other all-timers making it perfectly clear they were of the same belief.
The more you hear something, the more truth there tends to be to it, and if Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, John Goodman, Kurt Russell, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Daniel Day-Lewis, and many more have no problems calling Brando the cream of the performative crop, then it becomes increasingly hard to argue.
However, the two-time Academy Award winner had no time for such bullshit. Brando told Montgomery Clift to his face that he was the superior of the two, and he looked up to other names like Paul Muni, James Cagney, and Spencer Tracy. Being the eccentric guy that he was, though, he awarded the distinction of the finest actor of all time to a dog.
Not just any dog, but his dog, Tim, or Doctor Tim, to give Brando’s canine companion his full name. The on-camera icon was thoroughly unbothered and completely uninterested in embracing the status so many of his contemporaries had awarded him, and as far as he could see, nobody in the business was capable of delivering a better performance than his four-legged friend.
“Tim’s the greatest actor,” he declared in no uncertain terms when Connie Chung informed Brando that he was, in fact, widely believed to hold that distinction. “Tim’s the greatest actor ever. He pretends he loves me when he wants something to eat.” In response to her claims, he fired back with a simple, “Get out of here.”
When Chung tried to double down and convince Brando that the acting sun shone out of his ever-expanding arse, he once again waved it off. “See, that’s a part of the sickness in America, that you have to think in terms of who wins, who loses,” he explained. “Who’s good, who’s bad, who’s best, who’s worst. We always think in those terms, in the extreme terms. I don’t like to think that way.”
That’s easy for him to say, seeing as he’s Marlon Brando, but he was adamant that “everybody has their own value, in a different way, and I don’t like to think who was ‘the best’ at this, I mean, what’s the point?” The Godfather legend refused to be drawn into the conversation, and instead, he anointed Doctor Tim Brando, English mastiff, as the greatest actor of all time.
