I asked my Oscar trivia question to five people.  Shipra got it right while Kat, D and Mike came up with the wrong answer.  Sylvie had no idea and when I told her it was Daniel Day Lewis, she said the man creeps her out.  I was taken aback somewhat.  I mean why would such a seriously fine actor like him would creep you out?  But anyway, to each his own.  Kat said Jack Nicholson which is par for the course.  What was most interesting was Mike and D’s answer.  They said Marlon Brando.  A perfectly reasonable answer given that he has been one of the legends of Hollywood in fact film scholars and historians talk about the craft of acting in two parts namely before Brando and after Brando because he was the watershed as far as the method of acting is concerned.  Because until he arrived on the scene, acting was done mainly in a theatrical fashion which was far from natural.  But his approach to acting really changed the way subsequent generations of actors faced the camera.  Marlon Brando introduced what is now known as method acting where there is plenty of realism in the way you enact the character.  They call it “getting under the skin of the character”.  So it is but natural to assume that if anybody would have got three Academy award for best acting in a leading role, it would be him.  And yet that’s not the case.  Brando got two Oscars in his glittering career.  First time he won the trophy in 1955 in Elea Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT and the second time he was given the award was in 1973 for playing the role of Don Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER. 

When he was called upon the stage in 1973 to receive  the award, something almost surreal happened when I think about it.  Not only he refused to accept the award which  so many actors crave all there lives but he also launched into a full blown tirade against the American corporate and military-industrial complex in general and the brutal and exploitative treatment of the native red Indians by the state in particular.  Things got so heated that he had to be ordered off the stage by that poster boy of right wing America John Wayne who was obviously outraged.  By that time Brando had clearly aligned himself with the liberal agenda big time.  He was a sort of pioneer in Hollywood activism the likes of which men like George Clooney and Sean Penn have carried forward.