How Marlon Brando’s “first hero” and favourite actor of all time became an inspiration
Very few Hollywood stars, if any at all, can boast the ability to be able to rub shoulders with the legacy of Marlon Brando, a titan of American cinema often cited to be the best of all time.
Sure, the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman might be able to compete, but the sheer number of powerhouse performances Brando executed, alongside his own mysterious persona, makes him an all-time great.
It’s easy to forget how hard it is to become an icon. In the world of Hollywood, so many stars are given the limelight only for them to become a passing moment in history. A flash in the pan as easily forgotten as enjoyed in the first instance. But if there is one thing Brando is, it’s an icon. Known for being a watermark in film acting, Brando’s legacy is immovable from the very fabric of the cinematic tapestry.
Best known for his collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s classics Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, Brando was well-known before this decade, starring in a number of critical hits, including 1961’s One-Eyed Jacks, 1955’s Guys and Dolls, and 1954’s On the Waterfront. Nominated for eight Oscars throughout his career, the actor walked away with two statuettes before he bowed out of the industry at the turn of the new millennium.
Helping to transform modern acting thanks to his method approach, Brando looked to capture the character beneath the Hollywood sheen. As Edward Norton states of the star: “There are these people who come, and they have a kind of permanent before and after in a certain kind of field. He [Brando] changed the idea of the type of person male actors wanted to be. They wanted to be visceral, not polished; they wanted to be masculine; they wanted to be masculine; they wanted to be intense. When you look back on Jimmy Stweart, Cary Grant, like that is not what movie stars were aspiring to”.
Brando wasn’t living in isolation from the rest of the acting world, however, with The Godfather star also having a number of favourite industry icons, including James Cagney, John Barrymore, Fredric March and Spencer Tracy.
None of the aforementioned stars, compared to Paul Muni, however, the original Scarface, who performed with Brando during a stage production of A Flag Is Born in 1946. During the making of the show, Brando claimed that Muni’s performance was “the best acting I ever saw in my life”.
In a later interview with the actor, comedian and film producer Alan King, when asked about the greatest actor he ever saw, Brando stated: “[Paul] Muni, my first hero. Probably because my parents had taken me to the Yiddish theatre to see him when his name was still Muni Weisenfreund. I got to know him toward the end of his life, when he was doing Inherit the Wind on Broadway”.
As well as an iconic star of the stage, Muni also featured in a number of influential movies from early Hollywood, including Mervyn LeRoy’s film noir drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang with Glenda Farrell, and William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola with Gale Sondergaard.
The power of Muni would be something Brando would take into his own work. As comfortable on the boards of a stage production as he was capturing the eye of the lens on set, Muni and Brando possessed an understated power, coupled with sincere vulnerability, that made both men irreplaceable.
Unfortunately for Brando, he and Muni wouldn’t work together again after their stage collaboration of A Flag Is Born, with Muni working largely in TV until his death in 1967. Meanwhile, Brando’s career would take a bizarre turn after the 1970s, with the actor taking a number of strange roles, such as in Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut and the disastrous 1996 flick The Island of Dr. Moreau, based on the original novel by H.G. Wells.
