Marlon Brando Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska. He was one of three children. His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, and Frannie, Brando's other sister, was a visual artist. Brando escaped the profession gloom forecasted for him by his distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers. He set out for The Big Apple in 1943, to seek for an acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, so he was determined to make it his career. As a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on. Acting was a skill he perfected as a child of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother usually drunk to the point of a daze. The young Brando would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was very neglectful. But he loved her, especially for teaching him a love of nature. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank. These events disturbed the young boy. But that may have been the fuel that finely tuned his talent.

Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them. He turned them down because of his seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a disabled soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen.

It was this period of 1951-54 that changed American acting. It set off such imitators as James Dean, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every new up-and-coming star with true acting talent and alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting--and he was just 30 years old. After "Streetcar," for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances. Like in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug. Brando won his first Oscar, along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause as Johnny in The Wild One (1953)

In the second period of his career in 1955-62, Brando managed to make himself a great actor by being one of the Top 10 movie star. Although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, in the One-Eyed Jacks (1961). He made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando took part of. The falling out of Kubrick and Brando caused Kubrick to get sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.

Marlon Brando is known as one of the greatest movie actor of all time. He focused his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage farewell in 1949. This is a decision for which he was heavily criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s. During this time, he was judged for wasting his talents in movies. No actor ever put forth such a great influence on later generations of actors as did Brando. Fully 50 years after he first made a name for himself on the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). A quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors were still being measured by the yardstick and that was Brando. The 1951 on-screen interpretation of Stanley made him a cultural icon.