Marlon Brando died Thursday at 80. Many have called him the greatest actor of his generation. I'm not sure what that means exactly, but his greatest work rises to the level of myth, and myth is remembered most deeply of all. In fact the mythology is so strong that when I heard of his death, my first reaction was a vision of the Grim Reaper appearing at Brando's door, Brando shooting him a sideward glance, mumbling "Are you an assassin?" - the sibilance a stinging rebuke.

The NY Times has an entire section on Brando here - some of the highlights include a fine obit:

In the nearly 60 years since Mr. Brando first won acclaim, on Broadway and then in films, younger audiences came to know him as a tabloid curiosity, an overweight target for late-night comics, not as what he once was: a truly revolutionary presence who strode through American popular culture like lightning on legs. Certainly among the handful of enduringly great American film actors - some say the greatest - he has also been, without question, the most widely imitated. Virtually all of the finest male stars who have emerged in the last half-century, from Paul Newman to Warren Beatty to Robert De Niro to Sean Penn, contain some echo of Mr. Brando's paradigm.

Simply put, in film acting, there is before Brando, and there is after Brando. And they are like different worlds.

Yet, like Orson Welles - another famous prodigy who battled Hollywood only to balloon into a cartoon version of his early brilliance - Mr. Brando's had a legend built on a surprisingly small number of roles.

There is his epochal Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's "Streetcar Named Desire," a role he created on Broadway in 1947, at age 23, and then played on film in 1951. And there is his performance as the fatally noble Mexican bandit in "Viva Zapata!" in 1952. And then two crucial roles, as the first in a long line of leather-clad mixed-up teenagers in "The Wild One" (1953) and in his Oscar-winning turn as Terry Malloy, the boxer who could have been a contender, in "On the Waterfront" (1954), which many consider his finest performance.

After that explosion of creative fire, there followed a huge gap of years filled with intermittently compelling but largely unmemorable roles - and more than a few outright disasters - before a stunning return to form with "The Godfather" in 1972 and "Last Tango in Paris" in 1973.

....And more often than not, he would express contempt for the craft of acting. "Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts," Mr. Brando once said. "Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long."

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