The Best Actor category that year was particularly strong. The nominees alongside Marlon Brando were Michael Caine for Sleuth, Laurence Olivier for Sleuth, Peter O’Toole for The Ruling Class, and Paul Winfield for Sounder. Brando had won Best Actor once before, for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1952, at the ceremony that also saw him nominated for Viva Zapata! He had been, in the two decades since, one of the most celebrated and controversial figures in American film: a methodological revolutionary who had defined what screen acting could be, and a man whose off-screen life was characterized by equal parts genius and chaos.
By 1973, Brando had become something else as well. He was politically engaged in ways that made him unusual among major Hollywood stars — publicly committed to the civil rights of groups that the entertainment industry had spent decades either ignoring or exploiting.
He was not in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night. He had made a decision, and he had sent someone to execute it.
## Who Marlon Brando Had Become by 1973
To understand Brando’s decision to refuse the Oscar requires understanding who he had been for the nine years before the ceremony — a record that the public and the press largely ignored in their characterization of the refusal as grandstanding.
In 1964, Brando had traveled to Washington State to participate in what were called “fish-ins” — demonstrations organized by Native American tribes asserting their treaty rights to fish in rivers that state authorities were attempting to close to them. The Puyallup tribe and other Pacific Northwest nations had federal treaty rights to their traditional fishing grounds that were being systematically violated by state fishing regulations. Brando stood on a river bank with tribal members, was arrested alongside them, and appeared in court as a co-defendant. This was not a press appearance or a celebrity endorsement. It was a physical commitment to a legal and political struggle that had nothing to do with his box office standing.