Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

When people think about Marlon Brando, they think of the movie star, the hunk, the scandals. In Brando's Smile, Susan L. Mizruchi reveals the Brando others have missed: the man who collected four thousand books; the man who rewrote scripts, trimming his lines to make them sharper; the man who consciously used his body and employed the objects around him to create believable characters; the man who loved Emily Dickinson's poetry.

To write this biography, Mizruchi gained unprecedented access to a vast number of annotated books from Brando's library, hand-edited copies of screenplays, private letters, and recorded interviews that have never before been quoted in a biography. Original interviews with some of the still-living players from Brando's life, including Ellen Adler, his one-time girlfriend and the daughter of his acting teacher Stella Adler, provide even deeper insight into the complex person whose intelligence belied the high-school dropout.

Mizruchi shows how Brando's embrace of foreign cultures and social outsiders led to his brilliant performances in unusual roles--a gay man, an Asian, a German soldier--to test himself and to foster empathy on a global scale. We also meet the political Brando: the civil rights activist, the close friend of James Baldwin, the actor who declined his Oscar to support Indian rights.

More than seventy stunning--and many rare--photographs of Marlon Brando illuminate this portrait of the man who has left an astounding cultural legacy.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 06/23/2014
ISBN: 9780393082869
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.87lbs
Size: 9.72h x 6.37w x 1.74d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2014
Booklist 05/15/2014 pg. 8
Publishers Weekly 06/23/2014 pg. 155
Publishers Weekly 06/30/2014
New York Times Book Review 07/27/2014 pg. 10
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2015 pg. 8
New York Review of Books 01/08/2015 pg. 18