He is magnetic. From the arrogance of the upturned collar on his leather jacket to the overt sexiness of his close-cut jeans, Marlon Brando's Johnny Strabler is a threatening presence in this clean and ordered world.
"What are you rebelling against, Johnny? " asks the girl. "Whaddaya got? " he drawls.
At that moment, Brando became the poster boy for the postwar generation. In the classic 1953 biker movie, The Wild One, he was surly, tough and anti-authoritarian: qualities that the newly named "teen" generation loved, and their parents loved to hate. Banned in Britain until 1968, the film made the actor an instant legend. Overnight, millions of young fans worldwide adopted his laconic speech, and his black biker jacket became the symbol of teenage rebellion.
Searingly good-looking, Brando had first come to the attention of the public in the 1947 production of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire. As the loutish yet charismatic brute Stanley Kowalski, he caused such a sensation that, on opening night, he received a 30-minute standing ovation. When Streetcar was adapted for cinema in 1951, Elia Kazan, who directed both the theatrical and movie versions, wrote: "If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is. "
Neither did the public. Audiences were mesmerised by Brando's early work. His ability to throw himself into a role offscreen in order to "become" the character gave his performances a power and dignity that proved irresistible and would later inspire luminaries such as James Caan, Al Pacino, Sean Penn and Johnny Depp.
Detractors attacked his garbled deliveries and uncouth behaviour, however, and took particular offence to him famously addressing Vivien Leigh in Streetcar through a mouthful of tomatoes. But fans adored the bad boy on - and offscreen. And he lived up to his reputation - wearing jeans to official events (shocking at the time), insulting Hollywood columnists and riding a motorbike.
Brando's status as the first and ultimate screen rebel was consolidated in On The Waterfront (1954). Considered by many as one of the finest performances by an actor to date, his portrayal of thug Terry Malloy won Brando an Oscar and went down in cinematic history with his improvised line: "I could have been a contender. "
He could never have known just how prophetic this line was. For instead of a future of nonstop movie hits, Brando was about to enter his wilderness years. He became a maverick in the film industry and was all but written off until some 20 years later, when he would stage a spectacular comeback in the 1972 blockbuster The Godfather.
Born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, Marlon Brando (his real name) was the son of a philandering father and alcoholic mother. Along with his two older sisters, the young boy spent long periods without his father, who was often away on business. In his autobiography, Brando describes a childhood marred by his father's indifference. "He enjoyed telling me I couldn't do anything right, " he wrote. "He had a habit of telling me I would never amount to anything. " His mother, on the other hand, supported her son's love of acting. A keen amateur dramatist, she once starred in a local production opposite a shy young boy named Henry Fonda.
In 1941, Brando Senior sent his rebellious teenager to Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota, from which he was expelled for insubordination. Unwilling to spend any more time at home with his parents, Brando followed his sisters to New York and, with their encouragement, enrolled in acting classes. His teacher, Stella Adler, was a proponent of the Method style of acting, developed in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavsky and often associated in America with Lee Strasberg and the Actors' Studio. Brando proved a brilliant, if unconventional, student.
During one lesson, for example, the class was told to act like "chickens hearing an air-raid siren". Most of the students made clucking noises and flapped their arms, but Brando stood still, staring at the ceiling. When asked to explain himself, he said, "I'm a chicken - I don't know what an air-raid siren is. "
But if Brando was sometimes flippant, he was also passionate. Within a week of his arrival at drama school, Adler predicted, "Marlon Brando will be the best actor in American theatre. " And three years after he graduated, she was proved right when Brando got his break in A Streetcar Named Desire.
It wasn't just Adler who could see his attraction. Women found Brando fascinating and, as a young man, he was linked to a string of beautiful partners, including 16-year-old future author Jackie Collins and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, whom he flew to LA for a date.
But the star's romances were almost universally disastrous. His first marriage - to young actress Anna Kashfi, who was pregnant with Brando's first child, Christian, when they wed - was a dismal failiure.
A studio publicity handout on Kashfi, according to Brando's biographer Paul Ryan, stated that she was born in Calcutta to wealthy Indian parents in 1934. Brando had always had a penchant for dark-skinned brunettes, and Kashfi later told an interviewer that he was obsessed with her dark colouring and urged her to sunbake, writing in one love letter: "I like you well done. "
Unfortunately, it was Brando who had been "done". Shortly after the wedding in October 1957, he discovered that the woman he knew as Anna Kashfi was actually Joan O'Callaghan, a former waitress from Wales who had moved to London to work as a model. Her parents were, understandably, distressed by her deception, and Brando was furious. He divorced Kashfi within two years.
In 1960, he tied the knot with actress Movita Casteneda, but again the marriage was short-lived and lasted less than a year. Brando and third wife, Tahitian actress and Mutiny On The Bounty co-star Tarita Teriipaia, were together for a tumultuous 10 years - producing two children - until they split in 1972. Teriipaia recently published her memoirs in France, Marlon, My Love, My Suffering, in which she details their tortured relationship.
Kashfi, meanwhile, embarked on a 30-year war of words with Brando, in which he reluctantly engaged. She took him to court, alleging that he had hit her, while he countered with a claim that she had broken into his house. When Brando was awarded custody of Christian, Kashfi had the boy kidnapped from school and taken to Mexico. She continued to leak damaging details of her ex-husband's sexual proclivities throughout his life.
Brando's professional world wasn't offering him much respite either. Following his early success, he began accepting unexpected roles, such as a singing part in the musical Guys And Dolls (1955), a Japanese character, Sakini, in the comedy The Teahouse Of The August Moon (1956), and a German soldier in WWII film The Young Lions (1958). But it was the 1962 remake of Mutiny On The Bounty, a huge box-office flop, that proved his undoing.
As the star of the film, Brando insisted on haphazardly improvising scenes and refused to learn lines. To help him, cue cards were pinned to other actors' costumes. In addition, a new director was brought in halfway through and 12 different endings were shot, sending the project massively over budget. Brando was held personally responsible for the delays and escalating costs of the film.
By the late 1960s, the actor was virtually unemployable, so much so that when young director Francis Ford Coppola requested Brando for his new movie The Godfather, Paramount studio executives initially refused. "He's dead in this business. Worse than dead, he's a vampire, " was the verdict. Eventually, they reluctantly agreed to a screen test.
Ironically, Brando turned down the project, saying, "I won't glorify the Mafia", but he finally came around. And it was to be the watershed of his career. He stuffed paper in his cheeks, drew on a moustache, rubbed shoe polish in his hair, smoked, ate salami and jutted out his chin. "The guy's terrific, " said one of the executives at the screen test. "Who is he? "
The Godfather went on to become what is consistently voted as the best movie of all time, and Brando's performance as Don Vito Corleone won him his second Oscar. However, rebel to the end, when it came time to collect it, Brando sent a young actress calling herself Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse his statuette and read a statement protesting the treatment of Native Americans.
Brando was making headlines once more. In the same year, he received another Oscar nomination for his performance in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris. It was a role in which he shocked audiences all over again, this time with the film's explicit lovemaking.
Apart from his scene-stealing portrayal of the tormented Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), Brando's career renaissance was to be short-lived. "I'm a balding, middle-aged failure, " he once lamented. "I've tried everything - fucking, drinking, working. None of them means anything. "
As Brando's disillusionment grew, he gradually withdrew from the limelight and settled into a life of relative obscurity on his privately owned Polynesian atoll. He emerged only for a few well-paid cameo roles. In 1978, he reportedly received $US3.7 million for 12 days work playing Superman's father, Jor-El.
By this time, Brando had become openly contemptuous of his profession. "Hollywood is ruled by fear and love of money, " he once said. "But it can't rule me because I'm not afraid of anything and I don't love money. "
Ensconced on his island, he became morbidly obese - he was once hospitalised for eating too much ice-cream - and distanced himself from all but a small coterie of friends and family. Sadly, two of his 11 children caused him great anguish in his later life.
On May 16, 1990, police were called to Brando's Beverly Hills estate, where they found Dag Drollet - his daughter Cheyenne's lover - shot dead. Cheyenne's brother Christian, who had been drinking heavily, immediately confessed to killing Drollet but claimed it was an accident. Cheyenne, who was pregnant with Drollet's child, disputed this.
Christian had long struggled with alcohol and drug problems, which he blamed on his parents' bitter divorce. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison (of which he served five), despite his movie-star dad's impassioned appearance at the trial. "I tried to be the best father I could be. I did the best I could, " said Brando. Tragically, Cheyenne hanged herself in 1995 while Christian was still in prison.
In his final years, Brando was perceived as a recluse who spent much of his time in a wheelchair after a severe bout of pneumonia. "[Fame] made me feel kind of isolated, " he said in his last major interview. But it would be a mistake to believe that he died alone. In fact, he remained great pals with fellow bad boy Jack Nicholson, other actors and family.
A week before Brando died, aged 80, on July 1 last year, a friend noted that he seemed far from the lonely figure described in the tabloids: "He was his usual eccentric self. A little crazy, but as we all know, he was crazy and shrewd, like a fox. "
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