## Brando’s Career Before The Godfather: The Road to That Stage
Marlon Brando’s relationship to the Oscar ceremony he refused was complicated by his own history with Hollywood. He had not always been the politically engaged activist who sent a surrogate to decline the award. He had been, for decades, one of the industry’s most celebrated and commercially successful products — and his transformation into a figure willing to use the Oscar stage as a platform for protest was the result of a specific intellectual and political evolution.
He arrived in Hollywood from the New York stage, where he had trained with Stella Adler and been associated with the Actors Studio and its approach to performance that Lee Strasberg was developing. His film debut, in Fred Zinnemann’s The Men (1950), was followed by his first Oscar nomination for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), based on his celebrated stage performance in Tennessee Williams’s play. He was twenty-seven years old, and he was already recognized as something new in American cinema — a performer whose commitment to psychological truth in acting was so evident it made the conventions of previous screen acting look mechanical.
He won Best Actor for On the Waterfront (1954), which also won Best Picture. He was nominated again for Guys and Dolls (1955) and for Sayonara (1957). In the space of five years, he had established himself as the most significant actor of his generation, and arguably in American film history.
The decade that followed was more complicated. He made films that were commercially uncertain, that attracted mixed reviews, that suggested an artist who was as interested in exploring the limits of what he could do as in maximizing his box office appeal. The Fugitive Kind (1960), One-Eyed Jacks (1961) — which he also directed — Mutiny on the Bounty (1962): these were not easy commercial films, and their reception reflected that. By the mid-1960s, he had gone from being the most celebrated actor in Hollywood to being considered, by some industry figures, commercially unreliable.