In 1925, a slightly harassed young mother of a one-year old boy in Nebraska asked a family friend to take the lead role in the production she was working in at the Omaha Community Playhouse. The young friend, a 20 year-old drop-out from the University of Minnesota, and now an office-boy in a credit company, obliged.
This gave him a taste for theatre, and soon he headed east to take up acting seriously. Within a couple of years, he had found an acting friend - a former magician from Pennsylvania - to share a flat with in New York. The friend was called Jimmy Stewart. The university drop-out from Minnesota was called Henry Fonda. And the one-year-old boy whose mother had inveigled Henry Fonda into acting? His name was Marlon Brando.
There is no rhyme, no reason, to the rhythms of life, no sense to make of how paths cross, and of the different lessons we learn from those crossings. A few years later, Marlon Brando was expelled from military academy and headed east like Fonda and Stewart. By this time, however, war had come, and though in their thirties, both had temporarily left acting and had volunteered for active service: both were decorated for gallantry.
In fact, Brando should also have served: he turned 18 in April 1942, but he was rejected on medical grounds - or so he said, though it is hard to see what ailment would have disqualified him so totally. Perhaps the expulsion from the academy rendered him ineligible for military service. Whatever the truth, he seems to have spent his entire life trying to compensate for what he didn't do when duty called and others answered. His, classically, were the eyes of the father in the recruiting poster, gazing remorsefully into an empty past and an unfulfilled duty when the little child asks him; "What did you do in the war, daddy?"
That emptiness Brando filled with some of the greatest screen performances cinema has ever seen. He changed film-acting totally. But his other great achievement was almost entirely negative, and equally enduring: it was the creation of the Hollywood persona whose opinion counted, and whose philosophy of life was to be consulted. This transformation of a celluloid personality into a political guru and pundit was actually apotheosised in the daughter of the man Brando's mother had helped turn into a film star: yes, that dire, vapid, posturing little tosser we know as Jane Fonda.
For before Brando, film actors, classically, had been actors, not fonts of wisdom. No-one expected philosophy from Cark Gable or Cary Grant. Off-screen, Robert Mitchum's world was broads and booze. But Brando was different. His studied silences, his longueurs of confusion and inner turmoil, convinced cinema-goers this man knew something about human nature that others didn't - else how could he be the actor that he is? Because he was an actor. There's nothing more to it than that. Actors fill the void in their own lives with the representations, moods and postures of other lives - usually those lives invented for them by script-writers.
As it happened, Brando got good script-writers, often the best, and from the start: Bud Schulberg's On the Waterfront is one of the greatest screenplays ever, with one of the finest directors of all time calling the shots - Elia Kazan. Both director and writer had been in the Communist Party, both had relented, and both men testified before the House of Un-American Activities in the 1950s.
Brando, of course, had never got involved in anything political, and he possibly even envied Kazan and Schulberg their principled, if wrong-headed passions. In fact, as a young man he was probably as empty of principle as the young man on the motor-bike in The Wild One who was asked what he was rebelling against. "Whaddya got?" was his reply.
Actually, what we got was an actor that could stand in any company, anywhere. Critics have tended to disdain his Marc Anthony in Joseph Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, indeed, as they disdain the film itself. In fact, it's a fine film in which he mixes with the highest acting company of classical British actors - John Gielgud, James Mason, Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr. He was their measure in every regard, yet his was a collegiate performance in which he very studiedly stole no scenes.
Some of his films - Viva Zapata, The Young Lions, The Ugly American - are never seen any more, not even at 4 am on Sky Channel 117, though they are worth watching for his performances alone. Yet it all meant nothing to him. Acting, he once - and largely accurately - said, was an empty and useless profession. Even his protest against the Academy Screen Awards matched that description: the so-called Indian, Sacheen Littlefeather, he sent in his place to reject the Oscar was herself an actress, without any aboriginal haemoglobin in her veins.
For Brando felt he had things to say, but when he opened his mouth, the world waited, with microphone poised ... Nothing. He turned to food. In Last Tango in Paris it was a smear of butter; a few years later, in Apocalypse Now, he looked as if he'd got the entire fridge. He ballooned further, as eating took over from acting in filling the unfillable void that lay at his core. If the US military had accepted him in 1942, and had managed not to kill him, it might just have given him a purpose in life; however, western popular culture would have been, simply, unimaginably different, and far, far poorer.