Marlon Brando

He is also a descendant of Louis Dubois, a French Huguenot, who arrived in New York around 1660.

His maternal great-grandfather, Myles Joseph Gahan, was an Irish immigrant who served as a medic in the American Civil War.

His patrilineal immigrant ancestor, Johann Wilhelm Brandau, arrived in New York City in the early 1700s from the Palatinate in Germany.

Marlon Brando Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American actor and activist.

Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time, he received numerous accolades throughout his career, which spanned six decades, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, one Cannes Film Festival Award, and three British Academy Film Awards.

Brando is credited with being one of the first actors to bring the Stanislavski system of acting and method acting to mainstream audiences.

Marlon Brando Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, as the only son of Marlon Brando Sr.. and Dorothy Pennebaker.

His father was a salesman who often travelled out-of-state and his mother was a stage actress, often away from home.

His mother's absence resulted in Brando becoming attached to the family's housekeeper, who eventually left to get married, causing Brando to develop abandonment issues.

His two elder sisters were Jocelyn and Frances.

Brando's ancestry was mostly German, Dutch, English, and Irish.

In 1930, when Brando was only 6 years old, the family moved to Evanston, Illinois, where Brando mimicked other people, developed a reputation for pranking, and met Wally Cox, with whom he remained friends until Cox's death in 1973.

In 1936, his parents separated and he and his siblings moved with their mother to Santa Ana, California.

Two years later, his parents reconciled, and his father purchased a farmhouse in Libertyville, Illinois.

Brando attended Libertyville High School, excelling at sports and drama, but failing in every other subject.

Brando fell under the influence of Stella Adler and Stanislavski's system in the 1940s.

He began his career on stage, adeptly reading his characters and consistently anticipating where scenes flowed.

Consequently, he was held back for a year, and with his history of misbehaving, he was expelled in 1941.

Brando was sent by his father to Shattuck Military Academy, where his father had himself studied.

There, Brando continued to excel at acting until 1943 when he was put on probation for being insubordinate to an officer during maneuvers.

He was confined to the campus, but sneaked into town and was caught.

The faculty voted to expel him although he was supported by the students who thought expulsion was too harsh.

Brando was invited back for the following year but decided instead to drop out of high school.

He then worked as a ditch-digger as a summer job arranged by his father and tried to enlist in the Army, but his routine physical revealed that a football injury he had sustained at Shattuck had left him with a trick knee; he was classified physically unfit for military service.

Brando decided to follow his sisters to New York, studying at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, part of the Dramatic Workshop of the New School, with influential German director Erwin Piscator.

He transitioned to film, initially gaining acclaim and his first Academy Award for Best Actor nomination for the role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

His portrayal of the rebellious motorcycle gang leader Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (1953) became an emblem of the era's generational gap.

He received further praise and his first Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for his performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954), which remains a watershed moment in the history of Hollywood, and his work continues to be studied and interpreted.

The 1960s saw Brando's career take a commercial and critical downturn.

He directed and starred in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), a commercial flop, after which he delivered a series of notable box-office failures, beginning with Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), which damaged his career.

After a hiatus in the early 1970s, Brando was generally content with being a highly paid character actor in supporting roles of varying quality such as Jor-El in Superman (1978), as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) and as Adam Steiffel in The Formula (1980) before taking a nine-year break from film.

The last two decades of Brando's life were marked with controversy, and his troubled private life received significant attention.

He struggled with mood disorders and legal issues.

Brando continues to be respected and held in high regard.

After ten years of underachieving and markedly diminished interest in his films, he starred as Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972), which helped him win his second Academy Award and Golden Globe Award in a performance considered among the finest in the art form's history, based on extensive surveys of critics, directors and other actors.

With this and his Oscar-nominated performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972), Brando reestablished himself in the ranks of top box-office stars.

In a 1988 documentary, Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Brando's sister Jocelyn remembered, "He was in a school play and enjoyed it ... So he decided he would go to New York and study acting because that was the only thing he had enjoyed. That was when he was 18."

In the A&E Biography episode on Brando, George Englund said Brando fell into acting in New York because "he was accepted there. He wasn't criticized. It was the first time in his life that he heard good things about himself."

He spent his first few months in New York sleeping on friends' couches.

In 1995, he gave an interview in Ireland in which he said, "I have never been so happy in my life. When I got off the plane I had this rush of emotion. I have never felt at home in a place as I do here. I am seriously contemplating Irish citizenship."