The Original Method Actors

It would be no exaggeration to say that James Dean has been more mythologized than any other actor in history, a development due more to his off-screen personality and conduct than the films he actually starred in. Much of Dean’s appeal derives from his humble and ordinary origins, and audiences are drawn to the romance of the Indiana farm boy who catapulted to the top of the motion picture industry in a single year — the same year that would see him die.

Of course, James Dean remains well-known for being anything but humble and ordinary. As famous as his films are, Dean’s story is inextricably tied to his love for racing cars and his death in a high speed car crash. And though Dean was already wildly famous at the time of his death, there is no question that his death only enhanced his fame. One study found evidence of a “James Dean effect,” which concluded that a star’s popularity benefits if the star dies young instead of living longer and losing luster. By dying young, Dean actually ensured that his name would remain famous, and his appeal has transcended generations.

Marlon Brando.  Few names in the acting profession evoke such a strong, almost visceral reaction.  Over the course of his long, prolific career, he was considered perhaps the greatest actor of the 20th century as well as one of the most complicated and misunderstood.  Uniquely able to be both emotionally charged and technically constrained in the same performance, he single-handedly changed the direction of not only the American style of acting, influencing successors such as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and even Johnny Depp, but the acting profession on a global scale.  His iconic interpretations of characters such as Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire), Terry Malloy (On the Waterfront) and Vito Corleone (The Godfather) have been forever burned into the collective memory of film and theatre aficionados, scholars and critics for their immense passion, rage, love, defiance, vulnerability, cruelty and tenderness — basically, the full spectrum of the human condition.  With several Oscars and Golden Globes to his name, Brando’s contributions remain the gold standard of the acting craft, and the American Film Institute has listed him as the 4th greatest screen legend in history.

Brando was one of his generation’s sex idols, its most versatile actors, and a political activist, but who was the person behind the legend?  What propelled a young man from the Midwest to become such a powerful, capricious and dominating force in the acting arena?  How was he able to penetrate the human condition, replete with all its multilayered emotional baggage, and convey its strengths, weaknesses and delicate nuances so successfully, often while plagued by his own personal tragedies and demons?

In Edward Montgomery Clift, the public not only discovered an unusually gifted actor, but a persistent and stoical anti-authoritarian, an extreme non-conformist in a conformist age and a personal enigma who has remained the target of prying Hollywood reporting since his death. Described as the first “method” actor in Hollywood, he was to co-create and develop this lonely, unwilling and uncertain American hero, filled with deep personal ambiguities, a conflicting will, vulnerable and sensitive. In his eventual arrival to Hollywood following a lengthy period of resistance, he not only embodied this new male model, but inspired the next generation of fascinating characters who didn’t “fit in,” such as friends Marlon Brando and James Dean. He added to this screen persona a sexual dualism that, while not apparent on the surface, changed the way leading men were perceived by the late 1940s.

A first-rate stage actor, Clift approached Hollywood on his own terms, and permanently upset the ruling order of the studio-to-star system, in which long-term contracts guaranteed corporate ownership of the artist.