....When Mr. Coppola showed studio executives the astonishing transformation, they agreed to sign Mr. Brando for the part - but only at a salary of $250,000, a fraction of what he had earned a decade earlier.

The movie was a major critical and box-office success, acclaimed as a classic almost from the moment it was released. It also reminded critics and audiences of Mr. Brando's powerful screen presence. So no one was surprised when he was nominated for a best actor Oscar.

"Marlon Brando has finally connected with a character and a film that need not embarrass America's most complex, most idiosyncratic film actor," Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.

....Onscreen, he followed up his "Godfather" triumph the next year with one of his greatest performances, in Mr. Bertolucci's erotic "Last Tango in Paris," an X-rated sensation in its day. Many of his monologues, in particular one about being abandoned and humiliated, were drawn from his own childhood experiences.

Mr. Brando told friends he was no longer eager to suffer the psychic damage that good acting required. "'Last Tango' required a lot of emotional arm-wrestling," he wrote in his autobiography. "And when it was finished, I decided that I wasn't ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie."

....In 1990, Mr. Brando found himself back on the tabloid front pages when his son Christian was accused of shooting and killing Dag Drollet, the son of a prominent Tahitian banker and politician whom he thought had been abusing Cheyenne Brando, 20, his girlfriend. Suddenly, Mr. Brando's dysfunctional family became fodder for the gossip pages.

People magazine in 1995 said that he had at least 11 children - 5 by his three wives, 3 by his Guatemalan housekeeper, Christina Ruiz, and 3 from other affairs. Other reports hinted at still others. Mr. Brando refused to talk about it.

....The actor told Mr. King's television audience why he loved the South Pacific so much and, in the process, explained something about himself.

He said: "When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense."

Times critic A.O. Scott offers his thoughts:

It seems fitting that Marlon Brando, an artist rightly credited with single-handedly bringing a new dimension of realism to American screen acting, can be remembered through a series of offhand, apparently unconscious gestures: Vito Corleone in "The Godfather," idly stroking a cat's belly; Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront," playing with Edie's glove; Colonel Kurtz, at the end of "Apocalypse Now," splashing water on his face in his firelit cave.
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