Is Marlon Brando really the greatest actor?

Yes.

I thought he was great in a few things, but only a few things. I wouldn't say he was from the same generation as Olivier.

He was very very good but not sure about the greatest. I sometimes question his versatility. Was Vito Corleone just an old, fat and tired version of Stanley Kowalski?

You make a good point R3. I also heard that Marlon didn't bother to learn his lines for the Godfather so they put up cue cards around the set for him.

NO.

NO.

No.

He was a sex object. And he went insane in Japan in 1958 and after that he became uncontrollable.

Agreed

[quote] topping the GOAT lists

Only adolescents compile "GOAT lists"; adults know about the nuances of those 'devils-in-the-details',

My vote goes to Peter O’Toole.

No.

Highly overrated and a nut job as well.

(Also, not that sexy, really)

I lucking fove him, my favorite performance of his wasn't Streetcar or Waterfront, it's his performance in The Island of Doctor Moreau. He never got to showcase his sense of humor as much as he did in that movie. He was tremendous.

I could never face that "sexy" one shot in Paris. Maybe I should give it a second chance.

just looked at the trailer - I couldn't even watch that for more than a few seconds - so, NO.

R2

Exactly. Olivier was born in 1907, Brando in 1924. I don't know that he's the greatest actor, but he's considered highly influential because of the more naturalistic approach of The Method. And yet Montgomery Clift, born in 1925, was also incredibly talented and he thought The Method was hyped-up nonsense.

NO . that was a quick an easy no. effeminate hammy ridiculously mannered closet case sellout and nutso. He was lucky Vivien agreed to film streetcar. From then on it only went down

He was only hot in [italic]Streetcar[/italic], that motorcycle film, maybe also [italic]Mutiny on the Bounty[/italic], but the uniform does the heavy lifting there. I'd include [italic]Waterfront[/italic] but the prosthetics.

His performance in [italic]Streetcar[/italic] was revolutionary at the time, and fossilised him as 'greatest' - but that opinion has been outdated ever since, a performance of that quality is par for the course, not some huge achievement.

He's certainly the godfather of the insecure machismo 'method' acting all American actors are plagued by to this day. There's a great video on YouTube about that - how American actors can't just 'act', they have to put themselves through a punishing self-flagellation - which is really the mark of a BAD actor.

A 'proper' actor should be able to switch it on and have a healthy attitude - Meryl has that, obvious example but an exemplary one.

I think the greatest performance by a man is Robin Williams in [italic]Doubtfire[/italic]. I say that sincerely and not to be contrary. Read the synopsis of that film - it shouldn't work, it should be a total catastrophe, but it's excellent, you believe it's real, he fires on all cylinders from start to finish, he's funny, he's sympathetic, he's magnificent - and ask yourself, who else could have performed that? Absolutely no-one.

He was hot as fuck in The Men, and his acting was raw and great.

Well I did like Last tango in Paris and that's probably the last time he played an everyday character.

He seemed to have peaked in the 70s

Apparently Laurence oliver was born about 2 decades before Brando and they are not from the same generation. My mistake I only looked it up after posting.

Brando was the most high profile of the Method actors, which was a fashionable mid 20th century trend but kind of a dead end as it only applied to a certain kind of realist drama, at a time when theater was morphing in all sorts of different directions. The Method wouldn’t help you with Beckett or Pinter.

When Brando exploded on the scene on Broadway and in films like "Streetcar," "The Men," and onto "On The Waterfront," he was a revelation because the raw emotion and vulnerability mixed with almost animal sexual presence and physicality was something never before seen. Since then, Brando-esque actors have come and gone and that style is no longer a novelty.

Brando had a big fall from grace in the 1960s after one crappy film after another, and he had been dismissed as a talent unfulfilled until he bounced back somewhat in the 1970s with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris.

I just saw The Godfather last night on the big screen (Regal is showing all three parts this week for only five dollars each) and he is mesmerizing; the greatest of all time, I don’t know, but there’s no denying his charisma and talent.

R5, What happened to him in Japan?

R13, Wasn't Montgomery Clift a method actor, too? The "antics" he pulled on some film sets are typical method actor behaviour and all for the sake of his performance.

Jim Varney was better.

"He was tremendous." Yes he was R10. EXTREMELY.

R24

Clift was not a Method actor. I recently saw a documentary about him made by his nephew that featured an old TV interview in which he said that all good actors rely on instinct and emotion but that he was not a practitioner of the Method.

R27, I saw the original interview on YouTube. Even though he denies being a method actor, he obviously is, he uses the same techniques and principles of method acting.

Brando and Clift studied at the Actors Studio under Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan. After Lewis departed over creative differences with Kazan and Cheryl Crawford, Brando went to Stella Adler, whom he had previously studied under at the Dramatic Workshop, while Clift went to Lewis disciple Mira Rostova. The Actors Studio then became closely associated with its new director Lee Strasberg and his brand of Method Acting, which both Adler and Lewis criticized and disavowed; hence, Brando and Clift's reluctance to claim themselves as Method Actors.

he is so attractive, so hot, so sexy in streetcar. but that is only film he is exceptional. for the other films, I don't see any different with other male actors. overall, highly overrated. and method acting, it is not always good in many films. the actors/actress is so dumb and plain by using it, that is why there is no good actors/actress nowadays. they are too nature to lose the charm and magic.

[quote]that motorcycle film

The Wild One

[quote]that motorcycle film

The Wild One

The Method, as purveyed in the US, WAS a crock. Brando was a great actor who happened to use it, and was God's gift to that school.

The Method as practised in Russia was developed at the same time as Chekhov plays were developed, and focusses on actors being so at one with their character that they know what to do all the time they are NOT speaking, which is most of the time in a Chekhov (lots of long speeches). Russian companies also played in rep, and actors would play the same character in a play for sometimes years on end, so they got a chance to explore character as you never could in a movie.

[quote] and actors would play the same character in a play for sometimes years on end, so they got a chance to explore character as you never could in a movie.

Theatre actors know how to act; people in movies know how to stand in front of a camera and recite some scraps of dialogue given to them.

That's not really fair, R34. They have to be able to act in chronological order when the movie is not shot that way: that's a considerable skill and one theatre actors would have to learn.

Yeah please explain the Japan comment. What happened there? R5

Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Lee Strasberg were all proponents of Konstantin Stanislavski's method, but Adler and Meisner openly disagreed with Strasberg's interpretation of Stanislavski's teaching, arguing that focusing too much on emotional recall was psychologically damaging and irrelevant to developing a character.

If he had good meds for his bipolar disorder, he could have been. His excellent early acting was probably from acting out his childhood trauma. I think he had some nervous breakdowns and started phoning it in. That method acting style can be dangerous for one's psyche.

He's important but I feel John Garfield and Montgomery Clift acted more naturally. Brando had incredible presence and charisma.

No

Can never sink into a role. Always looks like Marlon Brando playing a Type rather than actually becoming a character. After his first few movies, he's painfully obvious that he thinks he's putting on a great show of transformation but he never transforms. He's always Marlon Brando. Horrible, hammy actor. No.

He really was exceptional. The Godfather, Streetcar, and one of my under the radar favs, The Freshman with Matthew Broderic in which he plays a parody of his Godfather character.

How can anybody measure the “greatest” actor. He’s simply one of the more compelling on film.

He's particularly good in that Faye Dunaway film, the Costa Rica one that was the hit of all Cannes!

He’s so good in Apocalypse Now. He improvised that Horror monologue (I read). Wrote it with Francis, or maybe even wrote it himself.

[quote] Wrote it with Francis, or maybe even wrote it himself.

Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe neither.

Kute, kween^.

[quote]the Costa Rica one that was the hit of all Cannes!

Kusturica

He really hated himself with all the self-sabotage he did and he had so many chances just on name alone. That comeback in the 70s was too brief.

R29

I saw an interview in which Clift said he was not a Method actor, period, not that he disagreed with certain proponents of it. He did say that there was a reliance on instinct taught by The Method that was common to all good acting. But it was clear that he thought the theory was pretentious and unnecessary.

R5, R23, R36 Brando’s sexual magnetism enabled him to break out from a stifling NY upbringing constrained by Christian scientists and a drunkard for a mother.

Sudden fame and fortune dazzled him in Hollywood but he got a taste of another world filming alongside dirt-poor Mexicans in their quest for freedom in ‘Viva Zapata’

He was yoked back to La La Land to make some Technicolor rubbish called ‘The Egyptian’ but (according to Wiki) suffered “mental strain” and walked out a week before filming was to start. He was then blackmailed to appear in another good-looking epic of Napoleonic rubbish co-starring the most fraudulent woman in Hollywood named ‘Merle Oberon’.

He was obviously sick of the deceit and sought out a different kind of civilisation in Japan and, as I say, went through a big mental-upheaval spending time amongst those people on whom his fellow-Americans had recently dropped two atomic bombs.

He made two Japanese movies. In one of them he suppressed his muscular physique, shrunk his body, and used make up to mimic the small, fey, roguish role Sakini in "The Treehouse of the August Moon". (It is pure ‘Yellowface’ which somehow seems to have escaped notice of the idiot-Millennials who shriek over Mickey Rooney’s Yunioshi).

Brando's mental instability and obsessions simmered over relations between native people and colonizers. It erupted again filming in Tahiti in 1962 in another story about the clash between a native culture and an imperialist one in 'Mutiny on the Bounty'.

He subverted his role by turning the English Fletcher Christian into an effeminate fop. He became uncontrollable to the man who was supposed to be in control, Sir Carol Reed.

Sir Carol Reed was a perfectly capable and competent film director but he may just have had a chip on his shoulder in that ten years previously made another film about another clash between a native culture and an imperialist one. This film called ‘Outcast of the Islands’ starring Trevor Howard suffered with faulty black and white location photography in Malaya. Now Reed had a lavish budget, excellent camera but a star who went nuts, spent his time with the Tahitian women and eventually sacked him as director.

A year later Brando starred in the movie ‘The Ugly American’ and afterwards took roles portraying Mexicans, Indians etc and appearing in other films championing native peoples against ‘the colonisers’ and his sexual partners included Indians, Mexicans, Polynesians, Chinese, Puerto Ricans and Japanese.

His career dribbled away until his death.

I reckon this guy has the same animal magnetism that Brando had seventy years ago.

So Brando got disillusioned by how morally bankrupt, alienated and racist American (and Western) society is and sought to get connected to Eastern and Indigenous cultures he felt were more naturalistic and harmonious.

Gary Oldman and Chris Cooper are my favorites. Some of these other “GOAT”s arw hammy scenery-chewers.

R52, Marlon was kind of a hypocrite, he was on Dick Cavett where he bemoaned the negative stereotyping of minorities in film and television but then he had no problem portraying those negative stereotypes of minorities in film himself.

R50

Brando grew up in California and Illinois. He came to NYC as a young man.

R54

He played those "ethnic" roles in the '50s and '60s. It was common to cast white actors. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of sensitivity back then. But still, to the best of my recollection, he never played a role as offensive as when Mickey Rooney played a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany.

[quote]Brando grew up in California and Illinois. He came to NYC as a young man.

R55 Also, Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born - and lived for his first six years. His mother directed the community theater, where Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire go their start in acting.

[quote] His mother directed the community theater

And she was a drunk who helped her son go insane.

[quote] He played those "ethnic" roles in the '50s and '60s.

R56, are you telling us that Jor-El was white?

He was moving into ethnic roles by his third movie

[quote] he never played a role as offensive as when Mickey Rooney played a Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany.

Well, Mr SJW, you obviously never saw this embarrassing, shocking mess.

R61, Lmao, so creepy, too!

Yes, R61, creepy and patronising. And we dropped two atomic bombs on them!

They had the sexy ass Toshiro Mifune who was even called the "Brando of Japan." Yet cast Brando in embarrassing yellowface. And also Zapata was a proud mestizo who flaunted his Indigenous ancestry.

Yes he is, OP.

[quote]And she was a drunk who helped her son go insane.

R58 What's your point, in answering my post like that? Nothing I said was incorrect.

R61

I saw it decades ago. I didn't like the movie or the character, but as well as I can remember, he wasn't as bad as the Japanese character Mickey Rooney played in Breakfast at Tiffany.

R59

Reread R54's comment.

[quote] bad

What do you mean 'bad'? They are both WRONG!

Why can't actors portray people of another race? I mean, if it's not making fun of the racial characteristics of the person ot the race (like Mickey Rooney). I don't see Linda Hunt raked over the coals much for portraying an Asian man in The Year Of Living Dangerously.

I have a feeling people don't mind seeing whites portrayed by people of other races in their own cultures. There have been Chinese productions of Death Of A Salesman. The Chinese were playing white people. There are no Chinese people named Biff Loman. In Japan Gone With The Wind has been done on stage, both in a musical and a non-musical version. All the actors - playing white and black people - were Japanese. Are all of you outraged by that? Probably not.

*the person or the race

Even though a big hit play and movie in its time Teahouse of the August Moon is pretty much forgotten. Now you can't even see why it was so popular in the first place. People still watch BAT.

Nah, that would be Ben Whishaw.

That's a big claim, R73. Can you name the five minutes in a Whishaw film that demonstrates his greatness.

[quote]Even though a big hit play and movie in its time Teahouse of the August Moon is pretty much forgotten. Now you can't even see why it was so popular in the first place. People still watch BAT.

You should try to figure out why it was popular in the first place. I bet you could. It starred two of the most popular male stars of the period, it was based on a popular novel and play, and it was topical. It was about tolerance between Americans and Japanese after the war in which they were enemies, and many Americans had fought in the war in the Pacific.

R73 Anybody who claims that anybody is the best whatever is making a big claim. If you don't find him great, that's fine. I do. Everything he does "demonstrates" it to me. I personally find Ben Whishaw to be a fabulous actor, and I can't isolate five minutes to "prove" it. I though he was terrific in everything from "A Very English Scandal" to "London Spy" to "Lilting" to "This is Going to Hurt." I saw him in a dreadful, pretentious play at The Shed in NYC shortly before the pandemic -- and he was the only thing in it that made in watchable. As an aside, in my zeal to reply to this, I hit the "WW" button on your post, so wahoo! Everybody wins.

Not really. On the Waterfront is the only performance of his that moved me. I also think he was good in Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Chase.

Is Ben Whishaw's fabulousness apparent in his face, body, voice, line-readings, choice of roles, private life, public demeanour?

No, he wasn’t and no, he isn’t.

R78 Yes.

^ I'm R80

Montgomery Clift was a better actor. I’d also take James Dean in East of Eden over any Brando performance but I know that’s an unpopular opinion.

At least Whishaw won't have Brando's tragedy of being born with a fabulous body. And then trashing it.

'it was based on a popular novel and play, and it was topical. It was about tolerance between Americans and Japanese after the war in which they were enemies, and many Americans had fought in the war in the Pacific.'

I would agree with all you've said but in and of itself it's just not very entertaining today. I love popular entertainments of the 50s. But I just didn't think it was very good. I love films like South Pacific and Mr. Roberts. They are as entertaining as they were when they came out and both are still beloved. I wanted to love August Moon(a great title as well and a great cast) but found it a disappointment. Maybe I need to see it again. But it's certainly not a classic film that people talk about much despite its popularity when it was new. If it comes out on bluray I'll get it and would be happy to say mea culpa as I'm a sucker for cinemascope color films of the era.

[quote] I'm a sucker for cinemascope color films of the era.

Me too. Marlon Brando was dragged kicking and screaming to appear in this rubbish. But it LOOKS so trashily-good.

It does look like fun. The kind of film that's a guilty pleasure.

Brando with another on his long list of sex-partners— Puerto Rican women, Indian women, Mexican women, Polynesian women, Chinese women, Japanese women, all Non-American women or Non-European women.

Look how Jean Simmons is standing on a box at R85.

They're trying to convince us that Napoleon was only 5′ 6″. Brando had to try and shrink his body even further when he was playing a character who was only 5′ 2″ in 'Teahouse'.

Another man with the Marlon Brando brand of Sexual Magnetism.

Big nose, slim hips,

I guess we'll never really know the extent of his relationship with Wally Cox. Anyone still alive who knows isn't talking.

R89 Big Tommy is now revealing all on Only Fans

[quote] I don't see Linda Hunt raked over the coals much for portraying an Asian man

As a lesbian dwarf she gets a pass.

When he was into the role, and it was a good one, he was unbeatable. But that only happened maybe a handful of times.

One thing I will say, as a huge Brando fan, he was absolutely horrible when it came to accents. Not once have I ever heard him do a convincing one.

Actually, it turns out it was me! Maybe I shoulda kept that Oscar.

R93 I don't think he was good at accents, either, but I thoiught his Southern accent in Sayonara was pretty good. It seemed really weird coming out of him, but I think it sounded convincing.

I think his Japanese accent in Teahouse of the August Moon is fabulous.

I think his English accent in 'Bounty' was atrocious. See R50.

He was a "posturing snob".