....There was another battle taking place in the Brando household, between the values of his father, a middle-class businessman, and his mother, a disappointed actress. By the time the boy was kicked out of military school, his sisters had moved to New York to forge acting careers. Mr. Brando stayed in Libertyville for a while, then followed his sisters to New York in 1943. A bad knee exempted him from the draft.

In New York, Mr. Brando enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. He seemed to understand the Method instinctively, how to use his own reservoir of memories and internalized emotions to find moments of truth. Indeed, some of his fellow students said that teaching him the technique was redundant.

"Marlon's going to school to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school," Elaine Stritch once said.

....In 1946, Mr. Brando appeared in several Plays - "Truckline Cafe" by Maxwell Anderson, "Candida" by George Bernard Shaw, "A Flag Is Born" by Ben Hecht - before a young director named Elia Kazan recommended him for the role of Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

In 1947, in that role, he exploded onto the stage. Although the play was largely the story of Blanche DuBois, the quintessentially neurotic Southern belle, played brilliantly by Jessica Tandy, Mr. Brando was all anyone could talk about.

....In the early 50's, movie stars were expected to be models of glamour when they appeared in public. Mr. Brando went around in T-shirts and bluejeans. He was often spotted driving down Sunset Boulevard in a convertible wearing a fake arrow that seemed to penetrate his head.

....Finally, in 1954, in "On the Waterfront," he won his first Oscar. The role of Terry Malloy, more than any other, is emblematic of the power and reach of the style of acting Mr. Brando brought to the screen.

"If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film, I don't know what it is," said Mr. Kazan, his director again.

...."Is Brando Necessary?" asked Film Comment magazine in 1969.

Hollywood didn't think so. By the time the director Francis Ford Coppola was casting about for an actor to play the role of Vito Corleone in his 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo's "Godfather," Mr. Brando's wasn't anywhere on the studio's radar.

Paramount Pictures was considering Burt Lancaster, Orson Welles, George C. Scott, even Edward G. Robinson. When Mr. Coppola told them he wanted Mr. Brando, studio officials refused. Brando was trouble, they said.

So Mr. Coppola, fearful that Mr. Brando would refuse to submit to a full-blown screen test, asked him instead to do a "makeup test," and to his astonishment, the actor agreed. Mr. Coppola described how he took his film crew to Mr. Brando's Mulholland Drive estate and quietly set up one morning. The actor, Mr. Coppola said, at first ignored them and then sat down and began to transform himself into Don Corleone. He put Kleenex in his cheeks, slicked back his hair, affected a raspy voice.