Marlon Brando^†

He spent his childhood retrieving his alcoholic mother from bars and reportedly started imitating farm animals to get her attention. Stella Adler taught him Stanislavski without the trauma-mining Lee Strasberg would later make famous. When A Streetcar Named Desire hit Broadway in 1947, critics recognized something had shifted. The mumbling wasn't a flaw. It was a character searching for words. On the Waterfront in 1954 won him his first Oscar and confirmed the shift.

By 1971, Paramount considered him box-office poison and demanded he screen-test for free before they'd cast him in The Godfather. He showed up with cotton stuffed in his cheeks and turned Don Vito Corleone into the template every mob drama has traced since. The film won Best Picture. He won his second Oscar and sent Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather to reject it, delivering a statement about Hollywood's treatment of Indigenous peoples. He meant it, which was the problem.

In 1966, he bought Tetiaroa, an atoll in French Polynesia, after filming Mutiny on the Bounty there. He'd planned solar power and wildlife sanctuaries. It's a luxury eco-resort now. In 1990, his son Christian shot and killed his daughter Cheyenne's boyfriend at the family home. Cheyenne died by suicide five years later. He kept the ashes of his closest friend Wally Cox for over thirty years, which says more about him than most of his roles did.

His memorial was held at producer Mike Medavoy's home, with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Sean Penn among the attendees. He was cremated privately, his ashes split between Tahiti and Death Valley, where the ashes of his friend Wally Cox were scattered alongside his. Posthumously, his family reportedly catalogued hundreds of pencil drawings and planned to release footage of Brando coaching Jon Voight, Nick Nolte, and Sean Penn on acting.