Bi Actor Marlon Brando Dies
by Mickey Barnes, 365Gay.com from the Web, July 2, 2004
Los Angeles, CA -- Hollywood has lost a giant.
Actor Marlon Brando died Thursday in a Los Angeles hospital at the age of 80.
Brando, whose screen career lasted half a century was among the first to embrace the Method school of acting.
Brooding, lusty, and intense, he brought power and depth of character to his roles, and he never succumbed to the Hollywood mystique.
He made his own rules, often contradictory, and shunned the trappings of celebrity.
"Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed," Brando told an interviewer in 1976.
Starring in films like "The Wild One" (1953) and "On The Waterfront" (1954) he was one of the first to popularize leather as a statement.
Brando's portrayals and image, are largely responsible for the rise of the leather movement.
Along with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, Brando created another gay fashion trend -- wearing T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up.
Up to that point it was considered improper for a man to show his underwear.
In the 1967 film Reflections In A Golden Eye Brando played a married gay army officer who is driven to murder.
In The Score (2001) Brando played another gay character but his performance was so outlandish most of his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
Nominated for eight Academy Awards, he won two. His first for "On the Waterfront" and the second for "The Godfather."
Brando infuriated studio executives by going millions over budget on his only directorial effort, the revenge western "One-Eyed Jacks" (1961) and was largely blamed for immense cost overruns on the South Sea Island set of "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962).
"Mutiny" director Lewis Milestone was one of many directors and studio officials he confounded with his distaste for authority.
"Before he would take direction, he would ask why," Milestone said. "Then when the scene was being shot, he put earplugs in so that he couldn't hear my direction."
Brando saw his overall attitude differently. "I am myself," he once said, "and if I have to hit my head against a brick wall to remain myself, I will do it."
Over a fifty year career he created some of the memorable characters and performances in the history of film.
In 1994 Newsweek cultural observer Jack Kroll noted that "whether he likes it or not
-- the stunning actor who embodied a poetry of anxiety that touched the deepest dynamics of his time and place."
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