He was only an actor and, as he pointed out, actors are no more than dishonest entertainers, frauds, pretenders, liars - he could be relentlessly hard on himself. But was it then any defence that he so seldom acted, that he had deserted the stage he had himself brought to life, or that he had come to regard movies with the hurt feelings of a Kong, hiding in his lair, unwilling to make a cheap spectacle of himself for those exploiting showmen?
Why trust acting or films, he sometimes said, for these things emerge from the pit of our corruption. Not that he had made himself, as an alternative, a model of quieter, domestic virtues. By his own gloating but tortured confession, he was a career womaniser, a glum joke as a husband, and sometimes pitiful as a father. Anything else? Why, yes, of course, he was a hulk, a wreck of obesity and self-indulgence, a hideously fat man - he who once had been so beautiful he altered our idea of maleness.
It can be no surprise that, at the age of 80, Marlon Brando is dead. Rather, it must speak to his will and need that he lived so long so out of shape and humour. And he was also so resentful of the world, and so scornful of himself, that it is hard to measure lost happiness. The man who published Songs My Mother Taught Me, his autobiography, in 1994 was already cynical to the point of nihilism, a tease and a trickster, yet always most mocking of himself. To read that book was to be disturbed at how little he liked himself, no matter the conventional armour of vanity in a grand actor.
[read on]
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