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Born
April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. Brando grew up in Illinois,
and after expulsion from a military academy, he dug ditches
until his father offered to finance his education. Brando
moved to New York to study with acting coach Stella Adler
and at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio. Adler has often been
credited as the principal inspiration in Brando’s early
career, and with opening the actor to great works of literature,
music, and theater. While at the Actors' Studio, Brando
adopted the "method approach," which emphasizes
characters' motivations for actions. He made his Broadway
debut in John Van Druten's sentimental I Remember Mama (1944).
New York theater critics voted him Broadway's Most Promising
Actor for his performance in Truckline Café (1946).
In 1947, he played his greatest stage role, Stanley Kowalski—the
brute who rapes his sister-in-law, the fragile Blanche du
Bois—in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
Hollywood
beckoned to Brando, and he made his motion picture debut
as a paraplegic World War II veteran in The Men (1950).
Although he did not cooperate with the Hollywood publicity
machine, he went on to play Kowalski in the 1951 film version
of A Streetcar Named Desire, a popular and critical success
that earned four Academy Awards. His next movie, Viva Zapata!
(1952), with a script by John Steinbeck, traces Emiliano
Zapata's rise from peasant to revolutionary to president
of Mexico. Brando followed that with Julius Caesar and then
The Wild One (1954), in which he played a motorcycle-gang
leader in all his leather-jacketed glory. Next came his
Academy Award-winning role as a longshoreman fighting the
system in On the Waterfront, a hard-hitting look at New
York City labor unions.
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