The magic: by the end of the fifties Brando had already made several films that defined the art of screen acting. A Streetcar Named Desire (51), inventing the screen rebel (The Wild One), and giving the screen’s most famous improvised dialogue performance in On The Waterfront: ‘I coulda been a contender. I coulda had class.’

In the sixties he directed his only film, One Eyed Jacks and acted in films which didn’t quite match  with his method techniques.

Then came The Godfather, 1972, and one of the most mesmerising of screen performances. The difficult gestation of The Godfather is one of the most interesting film productions. Nobody at Paramount thought the film would be a hit. Nobody wanted Brando in it. Yet the film became the high most successful of all time, and is surely the finest gangster film. Brando’s Vito Corleone died at the halfway line, showing how to die quietly, not in a hail of bullets but drinking wine in an olive grove and playacting with his grandchild (that scene was improvised).

Until Marlon Brando filled his cheeks with cotton wool, no actor showed such unconventional methods, and none went so far to create their character. The same year he was also in The Last Tango In Paris, going further in screen eroticism than  anyone else. When Brando won the Academy Award for The Godfather, he sent an American Indian woman in his place to collect the award. 

A sure sign of his contempt for film acting, yet there was more: the disastrous Missouri Breaks (76), Superman (78), and Apocalypse Now. And then what? By this point in time, the movie brats had taken over. It was the age of Star Wars and Indiana Jones. These were really kid’s films, nothing wrong in that at all but who was making adult masterpieces like Apocalypse Now or The Godfather? No-one, at least not on that scale, although Woody Allen made several small scale human comedies in the over the top eighties.

The Madness:

Brando’s weight. He looked like an athlete, muscle toned and powerfully masculine in Streetcar, or in motorcycle leathers in the Wild One. Vito Corleone was the most cultivated gangster, sinewy, as though the years of crime had hollowed him out from the inside. Seven years later he was being filmed from the waist up to hide his rapidly expanding bulk. He hadn’t gone as far as Orson Welles, in weight-gain, but it was still shocking.

The women: Brando was the prototype of the primitive modern male in his films. He didn’t do much better in real life. He married actresses Anna Kashfi, Movita and Tarita Tarripaia. His relationships with his children seemed to involve either abandonment or over-possessiveness. He fought bitterly with Kashfi over the custody of their son Christian. He was tried for the killing of his half sister Cheyenne Brando’s boyfriend, but died of pneumonia in 1998. After years of mental instability she hanged herself in 1995.

Brando was close friends with Michael Jackson, and appears in the thirteen minute video of You rock My world. The day after September the 11th, Brando and Jackson decided to flee New York State, along with Elizabeth Taylor. Disguised in sunglasses and hats, they borrowed a car and managed to travel unrecognised across the state, stopping for KFC along the way, the sheer implausibilty is hard to believe.

He spoke of his disdain for acting: –

“Acting is an empty and useless profession.”

“Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. Quitting acting is the sigh of maturity.”

“I’ve never had any respect for Hollywood. It stands for bad taste, but you work for three months, then you can do as you please.”

Others have paid tribute: 

He was deeply rebellious against the bourgeois spirit, the over-ordering of life. – Elia Kazan.

An angel as a man, a monster as an actor. – Bernardo Bertolucci 

Blind Date, Sarah Northan.

Charing Cross Theatre

May 30^th 2013

I used to love dating shows. Blind Date was my favourite TV dating programme. I watched it, glued to the television every Saturday evening from 1991 to approximately 1996. Unfortunately this new play by Sarah Northan has nothing in common with Cilla Black except for having the same title.

In fact it’s stretching things to call this a play, since the blind date of the title doesn’t turn up, and Mimi chooses a likely candidate from the audience (in actual fact this person has been carefully selected beforehand). That’s one of many drawbacks to a format like this. For it to be successful, the play depends very much on the man chosen to be her date. He needs to be charismatic, confident, with a voice strong enough to be heard through the audience. On the opening night, Mimi chose the improbably named Barty as her replacement date for the evening. He gamely went along with all of her wild ideas, whilst his real – life girlfriend kept watch in the audience. She was given the option of being able to call ‘bullshit’ whenever Barty was telling a lie, a privilege which she never took advantage. She also had the chance to call timeout, meaning that Barty and Mimi would then step out of the date scenario into a corner of the stage.

Mimi came out with a few good one-liners. When fashion designer Barty told her he created ‘interactive windows’ her response was “That would be a door no?” There were jokes about his height (he was fully grown as a 12 year old). Later, a scene change  took the play to the bedroom, the conclusion of the date. She was briefly vulnerable, revealing that she used to be called budgerigar eyes by her school mates. It was a shame the play didn’t go further down this road, sharing the many anxieties andhang-ups men and women feel about themselves. It was all very frothy, with some moments of pure farce, such as an incident where she was caught driving erratically by police and hides her wineglass between her legs.

Sarah Northan is a talented comedienne, delivering her lines with a heavy French accent, and wearing a red nose to look like a clown. She did physical comedy too, driving along to Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and giving birth. It would be worth seeing more than once  to see if Mimi can carry this off with a less willing participant and one with less to say.

Three stars