Website review: Marlon Brando: The King Who Would B...
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•vanityfair.com/fame/features/2005/03/brando20...
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frenchtwist rated 8 weeks ago- The King Who Would Be Man From his 1947 stage appearance in A Streetcar Named Desire until his death last year, Marlon Brando fought his own fame, with a pathological hatred of praise, an identification with the dispossessed, and a retreat to Tahiti. Talking to other Brando intimates, the screenwriter of On the Waterfront creates a private portrait of Hollywood's tormented king. by Budd Schulberg March 2005 Vanity Fair No other actor has ever rocketed to overnight stardom on the Broadway stage as Marlon Brando did in 1947, in Tennessee Williams's steamy play A Streetcar Named Desire. There have been some memorable debuts in the American theater--I still remember Elia Kazan, the director of Streetcar, in his acting days, shouting "Strike!" at the curtain of Clifford Odets's stirring agitprop play Waiting for Lefty in 1935--but nothing will ever compare to the explosion set off by Brando in his savage portrayal of Stanley Kowalski, the brutal blue-collar tormentor of his defenseless sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, who has come to take refuge with him and his wife. I will never forget the impact Brando had on me and the rest of the audience. This was beyond a performance. It was so raw, so real, that you wanted to run up onto the stage and save the poor woman from his taunting abuse as he ripped away her pathetic pretensions. At the same time, you were afraid the out-of-control Kowalski would flatten you if you dared interfere with his sadistic, sexually threatening fun. Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951. From the Lester Glassner Collection/Neil Peters Collection. What we were seeing was a new kind of visceral intensity onstage that veteran theatergoers had never experienced before. The bar for dramatic actors was being raised before our eyes. The way Brando's Kowalski raged at his fragile victim and totally destroyed her at the climax was like a hard punch to the belly of the audience, and at the curtain there was a strange pause, as if the audience were trying to catch its breath. Then the thundering applause, the standing ovation, and the bravos came as a burst of relief that Blanche's ordeal was over and that the cast could return to their dressing rooms and become themselves again. Who was this incredible newcomer? Where had he been while we were enjoying more conventional Broadway fare? From friends who had been in the Group Theatre in the 30s, I began to get his backstory ... ~ from the page *** ***
