These moments, and dozens more like them that flicker through every one of Mr. Brando's performances, even in the oddest roles in the worst movies, are more than just mechanical applications of Method. They help to transform our detached, ocular relationship with the man on screen into something like a physical connection. They are the emblems of his presence.

....More than 40 years later - after Sacheen Littlefeather and Larry King and Connie Chung, after "Songs My Mother Taught Me" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "The Score" - those words have the sad ring of prophecy. Much will be written about Mr. Brando's weight, his eccentricities, his political enthusiasms and his troubled family, but if his later years can be taken as a case study in dysfunctional celebrity, his career also reveals a deeper and more general disorder.

Being a great actor can make you a movie star, but becoming a movie star can be the unmaking of an actor's greatness. Mr. Brando intuitively understood this, and repeatedly sent his talent into battle against his fame. He was both an icon and an iconoclast, thus unusually and paradoxically self-destructive. He often professed to hate acting, and his best performances at once make nonsense of this claim and prove its accuracy. Hatred is, after all, an intense and unhappy form of passion, and the drive toward honesty in an art form founded on fakery is likely to produce cynicism and disappointment.

....If rebellion was the younger Mr. Brando's great theme, power was the preoccupation of his maturity. Is there a more complete, persuasive and ultimately enigmatic portrait of patriarchal authority than Vito Corleone? Has the desperate vulnerability that underlies the male drive toward sexual domination ever been explored with the raw precision of "Last Tango in Paris"?

David Thompson adds more on Brando the actor:

four or five times in his life, he found himself cast in roles that were emblematic of the inner confusions of his nation.

The first such role, of course, was Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Read that play on the page and it is unmistakably a play about Blanche DuBois. Stanley is away a lot of the time. But in our culture now it is a play about the two of them, in large part because the director, Elia Kazan, had to have a male figure with whom he could identify. And so a weird chemistry took effect: Kazan's heterosexual thrust animated the gay metaphor in Tennessee Williams's play.

The sensation of "Streetcar" - the 30-minute ovations it received on Broadway in 1947 - was never just for Blanche. (Who played Blanche in that first production? It was Jessica Tandy.) It was for this new male figure on stage, so close you could smell the sweat, a brute and a beauty at the same time - and Brando the kid was so beautiful the applause may have nearly overwhelmed the actor sometimes.

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