Charismatic Rebel Transformed Movies

In 1943, he moved to New York to join his sisters, Frances and Jocelyn, who were involved in the arts scene. He was a ditch digger, a department store elevator operator and a factory night watchman. He also became a roommate and friend of actor Wally Cox, the bashful star of "Mr. Peepers" and the voice of cartoon superhero Underdog.

Brando enrolled at the New School for Social Research's dramatic workshop, where his classmates included Harry Belafonte, Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger.

One of his instructors was Adler, who came from a distinguished family of Yiddish actors. One day in class, she asked her students to imitate chickens in a henhouse who had just learned they were about to be hit with an atomic bomb. While others flailed about, Brando sat still and pretended to lay an egg.

She was delighted to see one student true to being a chicken. Her motto was, "Don't act. Behave." She became Brando's mentor, and he learned from her what is known as Method acting.

"What Stella taught her students was how to discover the nature of their own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others," Brando once wrote. "She taught me to be real and not to try to act out an emotion I didn't personally experience during a performance."

In 1944, Brando was hired to play the teenage son Nels in John van Druten's "I Remember Mama." The hit play brought him a swath of admirers, including director Elia Kazan, who later co-founded the Actors Studio, which Brando joined.

Kazan persuaded producer Irene Selznick to hire Brando for the Broadway role of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's "A Streetcar Named Desire." Kazan was said to have helped Brando overcome his fear of not memorizing lines and also taught the young actor to use props to his advantage, a skill he put to use when gently stroking objects (a countertop, a glove, a cat) in later film roles.

"Streetcar" and Brando's performance in it were hailed as landmark theatrical events. Kowalski was a revelation -- one of the angriest, sexiest men ever imagined, who uses his animal appeal to manipulate the affections of his wife, Stella, and terrorize his romantically delusional sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois.

Brando once wrote that he was not so much drawing on his own urges to shape Kowalski as drawing from brutish people he knew. "I was the antithesis of Stanley Kowalski," he wrote. "I was sensitive by nature and he was coarse, a man with unerring animal instincts and intuitions."

During the two-year Broadway run, Brando and Jessica Tandy, who played Blanche, did not get along. Tandy, who was classically trained, reprimanded Brando publicly for mumbling onstage, leaving her without the verbal cues she needed. He retaliated with a series of pranks, once sending word to drunken sailors on leave that Tandy was available backstage for sexual favors.

The play was a breakthrough in establishing the Brando persona -- a raw and mysterious magnetism that was at once frightful and compelling. Though physically intimidating, he stood only about 5-foot-9 and had soft, soulful facial features such as full lips and long eyelashes.

Hollywood sought him, but he turned down all offers except Stanley Kramer's independent production of "The Men." The film, released at the start of the Korean War, was not a popular success, largely owing to its downbeat topic of disabled war veterans.

The filmed version of "Streetcar" launched Brando onscreen, but he was upset when he lost the Oscar to Bogart in "The African Queen." Film historians considered Bogart's win sentimental, and the loss burnished Brando's dismissive views of the film community.

Two more Oscar-nominated parts, in "Viva Zapata!" and "Julius Caesar," earned him further praise for his versatility. A British film reviewer noted: To grasp Brando's range, just imagine John Gielgud, Brando's classically trained "Julius Caesar" co-star, trying to play Stanley Kowalski.