Marlon Brando’s Rawest, Most Personal Performance
How a push past his training led to a career-defining role.
While speaking to Tribeca Shortlist about Last Tango in Paris in the video above, actor, screenwriter, and author Cary Elwes of Princess Bride fame raised an interesting point, “This is Brando, in the lead, right after winning the Oscar for Godfather, taking a huge gamble with this role… When he met with [Bernardo] Bertolucci to discuss the film, Bertolucci told him he didn’t want him to create a character, he said ‘No Marlon I want you to be you.’ And Marlon didn’t want to do it, so he really had to be cajoled and pulled into it. But once he did, he went full bore as he did with every role.” This got us thinking, how did Brando pull off such a raw, personal performance after a career notable for how well he could disappear into characters?
Let’s rewind: At the time Last Tango began filming, Brando had gone from being one of the hottest new actors in the world (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront), to flailing through an incredible mid-career slump (perhaps rivaled only by Look Who’s Talking-era John Travolta) in the ‘60s, and back to the top of the heap again with 1972’s The Godfather. But even through the many movements of Marlon, one aspect remained a constant: the effect acting teacher Stella Adler had on his craft.
As a brief primer, Stella Adler—who also taught Robert De Niro, Elaine Stritch, and more—based her teachings off the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and his way of training actors to deeply inhabit their roles and to think of their characters not as lines in a script, but as real people who had real lives leading up to that particular moment. As Brando studied with Stella Adler and later Elia Kazan, he honed these skills to a razor’s edge, and built a career out of acting and reacting in the moment, falling deeply into the character on the page.
So why on earth would he agree to work with Bertolucci on Last Tango in Paris, a film designed to blast past the Stanislavski/Adler style and tap into the real-life experiences of its leads? The film stars a 48-year old Brando and 19-year old Maria Schneider as Paul and Jeanne, a couple who meet for an illicit, anonymous love affair. Unabashedly sexual and graphic, tried for obscenity, and banned the world over, the film also received critical acclaim, and was one of the only NC-17 films to be nominated for an Oscar (for Best Director and Best Actor).
Bertolucci explained that his goal in creating the film was to “take off from [Brando’s] face the Actor’s Studio, Stanislavsky… mask.” Bertolucci strived for deeper truth in his story, “If Marlon would have come with a devastated face because he had a very naughty night, instead of putting a lot of makeup on his face I would have managed to use this devastated face because that was in front of the camera and there is no makeup that can hide the truth from the camera, because the camera always sees the truth.” Bertolucci’s approach captured astounding performances from Brando and Schneider, but both actors felt completely used, taken advantage of, and swindled after the fact.
But could Brando ever truly move past a reliance on the character to get to the personal? That question is at the heart of why his performance is so electrifying in Last Tango in Paris. As much as Bertolucci pushed Brando away from all he’d been taught as an actor, Brando still managed to insert a style into an autobiographical performance. And in the film, it’s almost as if Brando is playing Marlon Brando playing the character Paul. This mingling of Bertolucci’s and Brando’s gifts as artists created a strange, gripping style of filmmaking that may have only ever been seen in Last Tango.
Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker, said of Marlon’s acting, “Brando was great not because of his theatrical training but despite it. He was trapped in artifice through most of his career, when his mere presence was itself one of the most charismatic and original ever filmed. Brando himself was a living work of art, and most of his famed performances aren’t gilded lilies but gilded paintings. He was pushed to be overpainted, overvarnished, overdecorated, and only a few films of his get close to the true depths of his character — because the technical and theatrical side of his talent was, for the most part, the one that got praised and rewarded, the one for which he was hired.” With that in mind, what a brave move it was for Brando to take this role, and for Bertolucci to even think to cast him in it.
“Marlon Brando in Last Tango is much closer to what Marlon is in life,” according to Bertolucci. But is he, really? Bertolucci goes on to tell a funny little story. After years of hard feelings and silence between Marlon and Bernardo, they finally met. The director asked his actor, “‘Don’t you think that I achieved my mission, to take off the mask?’ Marlon said, he had this little smile and he said, ‘Haha, you think that one was me?’”
We may never know how close Brando’s character in Last Tango was to the real Brando, and unearthing all these layers may be a fool’s errand, but Last Tango in Paris, though controversial, remains the most real, raw, and unfiltered performance of his career thanks to a forced and unhappy marriage between Bertolucci’s realism and the Stella Adler system’s attempt to depict realism.
