Marlon Brando's Tragic Real-Life Story

Marlon Brando was the greatest actor of all time — or one of them, at least. You'd certainly be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't count him among the pantheon of Hollywood's greats. The foundation of all that intensity and that talent and that masculine bravado, however, was a life marked by misery.

Brando's existence was one of abuse (both given and received), tragedy, and a seemingly perennial decline, almost a paradox for an actor who drowned in adoration and accolades for nearly his entire life. From his troubled childhood to his rise to fame — and subsequent downfall — to the collapse of his family and his eventual, unremarkable end, little about his life inspires jealousy. But somehow, like so many tortured artists before and after him, he managed to find genius in his tragedy. That's why Marlon Brando's name today isn't synonymous with domestic abuse or obesity or murder — it's synonymous with the perfection of the art of acting.

Marlon Brando's later childhood — when he was known as "Bud" — was as tumultuous as his early upbringing. At a young age, Bud showed a knack for acting, gaining a reputation for mimicry (most famously of farm animals, as a way to distract his mother from her drinking), but his talent was overshadowed by his troublemaking ways. Brando was better known for his violent tendencies at school and was eventually expelled from Libertyville High School for riding his motorcycle through the halls.

Brando was then sent to Shattuck Military Academy, one of the top boarding schools in the Midwest. There, he gained a reputation for himself as a prankster and a rogue. A teacher at the school, Earle Wagner, was the first to recognize his potential on the stage and took the young Brando under his wing. By 1943, however, Brando had received one demerit too many for Shattuck to accept. Despite a student petition and a threat of resignation from Wagner, the school stuck to its guns and Brando was asked to leave.

Over the ensuing decades, Marlon Brando would become known as one of history's greatest method actors. According to Tony Curtis, he is "the epitome of actors today, and all actors since the 1950s have been mimicking him." There are dozens of stories floating around Hollywood about how he put his talent into action. In 1954's On the Waterfront, he improvised using a glove to toy with Eva Marie Saint's character after she dropped it during a rehearsal.

In Truckline Cafe, Brando's character was supposed to appear on-stage having emerged from an icy lake. Every night, before that scene, Brando would climb up and down the stairs until he was breathless before having a stage assistant throw a bucket of ice water over his head. While preparing for a role in Fred Zinnemann's The Men, Brando refused to leave his bed or his wheelchair in a veteran's hospital to capture the mindset of a wounded vet. His teacher, Elia Kazan, would say of the young Brando that "it's like he's carrying his own spotlight."

The 1950s were arguably Marlon Brando's best years. On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire had garnered him critical acclaim, while subsequent movies like Mutiny on the Bounty turned him into a household name. He had won one Oscar, been nominated for three others, directed his first feature film — One-Eyed Jacks — and had acquired a reputation as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men.

The 1960s were arguably Brando's worst years. To his fellow actors, he had become known for his erratic behavior and unpredictability, often irritating his co-stars by rewriting lines on the fly and forcing retake after retake to perfect his scenes. More than this, though, he began to fight back against his own fame by referring to acting as an "empty and useless profession," and dismissing Hollywood as nothing more than a way to earn a good paycheck. The films he starred in during the '60s were of a lesser quality than those of the '50s, and, by the time he finally found the role that made him a legend, he was known throughout the film industry as little more than a self-indulgent, greedy has-been.

If The Godfather gave Marlon Brando icon status, the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now cemented it — with a price. The production for Apocalypse Now was famously one of the most troubled in cinema history. What was supposed to be a challenging, 14-week shoot in the Philippines soon turned into a nightmarish concoction of logistical chaos, weather issues, and bad luck. Martin Sheen, the actor brought in to replace Harvey Keitel after two weeks, was an alcoholic. Francis Ford Coppola was rewriting the movie as he shot it. The crew was riddled with disease, and the helicopters used to shoot combat scenes had to be recalled to fight in the country's actual war.

And then there was Brando. When he arrived on set, supposedly to play the Green Beret legend Colonel Kurtz, he weighed nearly 300 pounds. Brando had failed to prepare at all for the role, with no idea about the character's history and few lines learned. One day, he shaved off all his hair and decided to improvise every one of his scenes. He also demanded that he be blanketed in shadow for most of the movie. And while Apocalypse Now went on to become a true classic, problems with his royalty checks meant that Brando despised Coppola and the movie for the rest of his life.

Of the many children Marlon Brando adopted or fathered during his life, perhaps the most notorious is his son Christian Brando. A product of his marriage to Anna Kashil, Christian suffered a troublesome childhood of his own, being occasionally picked up by the police for minor infractions and frequently ending up on the receiving end of his father's violent ways.

He dropped out of school in 1976 to live a decadent life in his father's house, and later ended up in his own difficult marriage to Mary McKenna. He was forced into rehab by his father for his drug problems and struggled to succeed working in Hollywood. Cheyenne Brando, Christian's younger sister, was meanwhile engaged in a relationship with Dag Drollet and had become pregnant with his child. Events came to a climax when, in 1990, Christian shot Drollet in the TV room of the elder Brando's Los Angeles home. A highly-publicized court case followed, helmed by Brando, which resulted in Christian pleading guilty to manslaughter and getting five years in prison.

Marlon Brando's final years were not glorious. He appeared in a handful of movies during the '80s and '90s, including The Formula, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Most of these were critically panned and none succeeded at the box office, with his failures compounded by the fact that Brando's name often appearing on the list of nominees at the Golden Raspberry Awards.

Media focus was fixed almost entirely on his family, particularly Christian and Cheyenne, and his health began to severely decline, not least because of his obesity. His troublesome on-set antics, too, had far outlasted their charm. Brando's second decline had hit a nadir. In the summer of 2004, Brando died of a pulmonary fibrosis at a hospital in Los Angeles; he was 80 years old. He left behind him a legacy marked as much by violence, death, and disease as it was by his rebelliousness, his charm, and his inimitable talent.