But it’s hard not to wonder, what would Brando say about all this praise? He may have been the greatest American actor, but he was also the most conflicted about success. Rather than pick up his 1972 Oscar for “The Godfather,” he sent a Native American woman to do it. Even his ballooning weight seemed like a fortress to keep the world out. You can’t blame him, what with his alcoholic mother and, notoriously, his son Christian’s 1990 killing of the boyfriend of Brando’s daughter Cheyenne and her 1995 suicide. It wasn’t easy being Brando. In her 2001 biography, Patricia Bosworth quotes an ex-girlfriend who was watching TV with the actor when they came across “Streetcar.” “Marlon told me, ‘Turn it off,’ but I said, ‘Please let me watch.’ So we did for a while, and then Marlon groaned, ‘Oh, God, I was beautiful then’.” Was he ever.
