MAYBE HE'S JUST GETTING READY TO PLAY LAZARUS...:

Marlon Brando, Oscar-Winning Actor, Is Dead at 80 (RICK LYMAN, 7/02/04, NY Times)

Marlon Brando, the rebellious prodigy who electrified a generation and forever transformed the art of screen acting but whose obstinacy and eccentricity prevented him from fully realizing the promise of his early genius, died on Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 80.

The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, said Jay Cantor, a family spokesman.

In the nearly 60 years since Mr. Brando first won acclaim, on Broadway and then in films, younger audiences came to know him as a tabloid curiosity, an overweight target for late-night comics, not as what he once was: a truly revolutionary presence who strode through American popular culture like lightning on legs. Certainly among the handful of enduringly great American film actors — some say the greatest — he has also been, without question, the most widely imitated. Virtually all of the finest male stars who have emerged in the last half-century, from Paul Newman to Warren Beatty to Robert De Niro to Sean Penn, contain some echo of Mr. Brando's paradigm.

Simply put, in film acting, there is before Brando, and there is after Brando. And they are like different worlds. [...]

[M]ore often than not, he would express contempt for the craft of acting. "Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts," Mr. Brando once said. "Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long."

He described himself as a lazy man, and he was notoriously lax about learning his lines. "If a studio offered to pay me as much to sweep the floor as it did to act, I'd sweep the floor," he said. "There isn't anything that pays you as well as acting while you decide what the hell you're going to do with yourself. Who cares about the applause? Do I need applause to feel good about myself?"

Yet no one was better at finding brilliant touches that brought a character to life. Many have pointed to a scene in "On the Waterfront" during which he delicately put on the dainty lace glove of the young woman he was awkwardly trying to court, a seemingly unconscious gesture that fills the moment with heart-breaking vulnerability. [...]

Mr. Brando was not the first actor to bring to the screen the style known as the Method — an internalized acting technique promulgated in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski in the 1920's and then popularized in New York in the 40's by evangelists like Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner — and Stella Adler, Mr. Brando's beloved teacher. But Mr. Brando was the first to make clear how truly powerful and culture-shaking the Method could be, in the right hands.

"His brutish explosions of anger, his displays of vanity onstage were seen by pretentious and unpretentious reviewers alike as having an immediacy new to the theater," wrote Harold Brodkey in The New Yorker in 1994.

For all its claims to authenticity there's never been anything more mannered and artificial than Method acting, which Laurence Olivier pronounced the epitaph for on the set of Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman supposedly prepared for the famous torture scene by staying awake all night and running himself ragged. A bewildered Olivier asked what he was doing and Hoffman replied that he needed to be in the moment, or whatever nonsense they use to describe their shtick, prompting Olivier to ask: "Why not try acting, dear boy?"

Mr. Brando did though star in one of the best films of the 1950's, On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan's brilliant vindication of witchhunting.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 3, 2004 9:46 AM