22 Photos of a Young and Handsome Marlon Brando in the 1950s

Marlon Brando (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) has fascinated the public with his intense onscreen presence. His film career began in the 1950s and has included powerful roles in such classic films as On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Godfather.

Brando made his Broadway debut in I Remember Mama in 1944. The New York theater critics voted him Broadway’s Most Promising Actor for his performance in 1946. In 1947 he played his greatest stage role, Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s drama A Streetcar Named Desire.

Before James Dean, Marlon Brando popularized the jeans-and-T-shirt look, as a movie idol during the early 1950s. Hollywood was impressed with Brando, and in 1950 he made his motion picture debut as a severely injured war veteran in The Men. He went on to play Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. The movie was both a popular and a critical success.

Brando played a variety of different characters over the next several years. In his next movie, Viva Zapata! (1952), he played Emiliano Zapata, who rose from being a peasant (a poor farmer) to becoming the president of Mexico. He was Marc Antony in the film version of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1953). He played a motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One (1954), portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte in Désirée (1954), and sang and danced as Sky Masterson in the musical comedy Guys and Dolls (1955). Brando won his first Academy Award in 1954 for his role in On the Water-front, a hard-hitting look at New York City labor unions (a workers’ group organized to help workers receive fair wages).

From 1955 to 1958 people in the movie industry always voted Brando as one of the top ten film attractions in the nation. During the 1960s, however, his career had more downs than ups. In 1962 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios decided to remake Mutiny on the Bounty, which had originally been filmed in 1935. The movie was a disaster at the box office. It failed to earn even half of its enormous budget (the money it cost to make it). Brando’s excessive self-indulgence (spoiled behavior) reached its height during the filming of this movie. He was criticized for his tantrums (fits of bad temper) on the set and for trying to alter the script. Off the set he ate too much and would not associate with the cast and crew. For the rest of the 1960s Brando acted in several movies, but none of them was considered to be of very high quality.