Brando's Smile

When people think about Marlon Brando, they think of the movie star, the hunk, the scandals. In Brandos Smile, Susan L. Mizruchi reveals the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create believable characters; the man who loved Emily Dickinsons poetry. To write this biography, Mizruchi gained unprecedented access to a vast number of annotated books from Brandos library, hand-edited copies of screenplays, private letters, and recorded interviews that have never before been quoted in a biography. Original interviews with some of the still-living players from Brandos life, including Ellen Adler, his one-time girlfriend and the daughter of his acting teacher Stella Adler, provide even deeper insight into the complex person whose intelligence belied the high-school dropout. Mizruchi shows how Brandos embrace of foreign cultures and social outsiders led to his brilliant performances in unusual rolesa gay man, an Asian, a German soldierto test himself and to foster empathy on a global scale. We also meet the political Brando: the civil rights activist, the close friend of James Baldwin, the actor who declined his Oscar to support Indian rights. More than seventy stunningand many rarephotographs of Marlon Brando illuminate this portrait of the man who has left an astounding cultural legacy.