Charismatic Rebel Transformed Movies

Winner of Two Oscars Rejected One

Marlon Brando, whose blend of sensitivity and savagery brought him acclaim as one of the greatest actors of his generation and whose tumultuous personal life made him an icon of defiance onscreen and off, died Thursday. He was 80.

He died at a Los Angeles hospital, whose spokeswoman said he had lung failure. He also suffered from heart ailments.

Moody performers such as Humphrey Bogart made the stiff, brilliantined leading man seem obsolete by the 1940s. But it was Brando -- sweaty, swaggering, mumbling, wounded, brutish and beautiful -- who further heightened expectations in postwar cinema. He won two Academy Awards, for "On the Waterfront" and "The Godfather," and created a menagerie of unforgettable characters in films from "A Streetcar Named Desire" to "Apocalypse Now."

His naked emotional display on the screen was matched by an often-tragic series of events in his private life, from his pain-racked childhood to his failed marriages to his self-castigating courtroom pleas during his son Christian's manslaughter trial. He also made disastrously indulgent career choices as he came to view acting as a lark and spent decades teetering between being a has-been and creating major milestones in performance.

His artistry in his greatest films transcended everything. As Newsweek cultural observer Jack Kroll wrote in 1994, "That will be Brando's legacy whether he likes it or not -- the stunning actor who embodied a poetry of anxiety that touched the deepest dynamics of his time and place."

It was clear from Brando's screen debut as a scornful paraplegic war veteran in "The Men" (1950) and his explosive work as Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) that he was a towering new breed of actor, able to display a naked and raw soul that ached with passion but also was unpredictably bestial.

One critic noted that in "The Men," Brando "comes like a blood transfusion into cinema acting," and later writers confirmed his legacy: With his pinup magnetism and dazzling range, he simply dominated all discussions about film acting.

One of his greatest accomplishments as an actor was his ability to penetrate the deepest thoughts of his characters and convey their motivations finely and believably. He drew on a lifetime of emotional distress, his brilliance at mimicry and his own intuition to bring new dimensions of psychological motivation to his roles. Although his characters were capable of raping and threatening, he was praised for making those actions appear poetic and tragic, bestowing timeless resonance to his art.

Few other actors made so many instant classics. In more than 40 films, his gallery of most-admired performances includes: "Viva Zapata!" (1952), as Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata; "Julius Caesar" (1953), as Marc Antony; "On the Waterfront" (1954), as longshoreman Terry Malloy, who takes a lonely stand against organized crime; "The Wild One" (1954), as a motorcycle gang leader; and "Sayonara" (1957), as a military officer who romances a Japanese dancer.

After a series of 1960s flops, he experienced an unexpected renaissance in the 1970s with "The Godfather" (1972), as mafia chieftain Vito Corleone; "Last Tango in Paris" (1972), as a man who, after his wife's suicide, goes on a sexual spree that is both liberating and tortuous; and "Apocalypse Now" (1979), as Army Col. Walter E. Kurtz, a symbol of madness during the Vietnam War.

Although his role was brief, he also played Jor-El, the title superhero's father, in the blockbuster "Superman" (1978).

Of eight Oscar nominations, he won twice for best actor. He also won an Emmy Award for a supporting role as George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi, in the television miniseries "Roots: The Next Generations" (1979).

Brando also had a huge impact on public behavior. He was, at first, a strikingly muscular and vital figure who defined 1950s leather-jacketed masculinity. He wore jeans to swank parties, insulted starmaking gossip columnists and flaunted his preference for dark-skinned women, then a social taboo -- anything to pique the Hollywood system that tried to control his public image.

He infuriated studio executives by going millions of dollars over budget on his only directorial effort, the revenge Western "One-Eyed Jacks" (1961), and was largely blamed for immense cost overruns on the South Seas island set of "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962).