Brando biography somebody told

Stefan Kanfer, acclaimed biographer of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx, now gives us the definitive life of Marlon Brando, seamlessly intertwining the man and.
Stefan Kanfer's new biography of Brando, “Somebody,” is an antidote of sorts to the unsavory and voyeuristic 1994 biography written by Peter Manso.
This “Somebody”no doubt is a nod to “On the Waterfront,”in which he says “ I could have been Somebody, I could have been a Contender.”Stefan.

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The Books: “Brando: The Biography” (Peter Manso)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Brando: The Biography, by Peter Manso

Peter Manso has an opinion about Marlon Brando, and it colors this entire book – which is 10,000 pages long – so that’s a long time to stick with a writer who has a low-level (sometimes high-level) strain of contempt for his subject. I do not share Manso’s contempt – even for Brando’s quirks of personality, his selfish side, his womanizing, his bad parenting, his naive politics, the list goes on and on … Brando led a long life, checkered with questionable behavior, and some outright tragedy (that business with his daughter) … but I seriously don’t care about any of that. Or – I care, because it’s interesting, and he’s an interesting topic – but knowing about his flawed personality does not take away from his work as an actor, or his giant reputation. And I don’t like a book that takes that tone. The problem here is a matter of tone. You may not feel tha

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What Battsek, Riley and Brando’s estate achieved could arguably be labelled Marlon Brando’s last performance. For more than 100 minutes Marlon’s voice pours into the audience’s ears. We hear him thinking, questioning, exploring. We hear the rebel, the lover, the clown, the activist and, yes, the “contender”. It takes in everything from his success on Broadway with AStreetcar Named Desire in 1947, the renown he found in On The Waterfront in 1954, to his distrust of the film industry, the death of Dag and beyond, all narrated by a man who, because of his vast fame, is both familiar and unfamiliar to us. It is a private audience with the best actor of all time – a label that sticks whether Brando himself would have liked it or not – and a film at times so intimate one wonders whether anyone should be listening at all.

Brando loathed his father. It was a hatred that frothed and boiled underneath his skin like only bad blood between relatives can. When his first son was born, tapes heard for the first time here illuminate how deep his mistrust and anger ran. “I didn’t want my fa

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“If I hadn’t been an actor, I’ve often thought I’d have become a con man and wound up in jail.”

So writes the iconic Marlon Brando in his 1994 autobiography, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, co-written by Robert Lindsey. The smoldering star of A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and Last Tango in Paris, Brando redefined what it meant to be an actor and a star.

Yet the man behind the star is a much more slippery affair. Songs My Mother Taught Me reads in part as an apologia from a charming, brilliant, curious, deeply eccentric man who claims he used to be angry, used to be bad to women—without offering much proof of his professed transformation.

Brando refused to write about his wives or his eleven children, and uses pseudonyms for the romantic partners he does discuss—meaning that we don’t hear about his alleged relationships with the likes of Richard Pryor, Shelley Winters, Christian Marquand, and Ursula Andress. Though he can’t resist admitting to a quick affair with his friend Marilyn Monroe—whom he believes was murdered.

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