Marlon Brando’s unlikely pick for the “unsung hero” of acting: “He could do almost anything”
At no point during his career did anyone call Marlon Brando unsung, underrated, unacknowledged, or anything remotely similar, but he believed there was one actor who deserved all that and more.
As one of the greatest of all time, arguably the greatest, an opinion shared by a who’s who of legends, icons, and awards-laden veterans like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Kurt Russell, and John Goodman, Brando was too good to ever be underestimated.
From the moment he first burst onto the scene in the 1950s, he was a phenomenon. The first decade of his career completely reinvented the profession, and even when he grew increasingly lazy, difficult, eccentric, and reclusive, flashes of the old brilliance occasionally resurfaced to remind everyone who he was.
The point is, Brando was a force unto himself, and there was no chance anyone could say with a straight face that he never received the praise he deserved. If you asked the man himself, though, he’d say he wasn’t worthy of any of it because he hated the idea of his contemporaries fawning over him.
Of course, that didn’t stop them, even if the two-time Academy Award winner himself was caught fawning once or twice. Not often, especially when he was more likely to verbally eviscerate the actors he didn’t like as opposed to lavish the ones he did with praise, but being called an entire art form’s unsung hero by someone like Brando is about the nicest thing one actor can have said about them.
“Mickey Rooney is an unsung hero of the actors’ world,” he declared in his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me. “He never became a leading man; he was too short, his teeth weren’t straight, and he didn’t have sex appeal, but like Jimmy Cagney, he could do almost anything.”
Even though Brando was clearly celebrating Rooney, he still came off as a little harsh by effectively calling him a crooked-toothed and sexless failure of an above-the-line talent once he aged out of his massively successful child star phase. Still, he wasn’t the only acting icon to think so highly of the prolific performer.
Laurence Olivier, another nailed-on contender for the single greatest actor to ever tread the boards or grace the silver screen, called Rooney “the best there has ever been,” so Brando’s assessment isn’t quite as far-fetched as it may seem, despite the diminutive star being unlikely to infiltrate many conversations regarding the all-time cream of the crop.
By the time Brando turned acting upside down with his incendiary performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, Rooney was already sliding down the Hollywood ladder. While he did manage to rebuild himself as an in-demand and acclaimed character actor in his later years, earning two Oscar nods for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in 1957 and 1980 to indicate his longevity, he was held in higher esteem by his peers than audiences or studio executives.
That said, who’s to disagree if Brando thinks he’s the unsung hero of acting?
