Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393082869)

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.

Author: Susan L. Mizruchi
ISBN-10: 0393082865
ISBN-13: 9780393082869
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 06/23/2014
Pages: 512
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.87lbs
Size: 9.72h x 6.37w x 1.74d

Review Citation(s):
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