“... of student, a President of the Oxford Union on a debating tour. He mingled with Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Sartre – and, most amusingly, with John Lennon, who rightly urged him ‘to get those left-wing students out, to talk to the workers. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel, a Marx, a Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were ...”

“... room, I wrote the last sentence of the novel Burr.’ The supporting cast in this séance included Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo, André Gide, the Beat poets, the Kennedys and the Sitwells. To follow a triumphant vanity production like Palimpsest with an authorised biography is a bit too-too. It’s as if Vidal were commissioning a monument to fit inside the ...”

“... was a stand-up comedian who never set one loafered foot on a Broadway stage. And then there’s Marlon Brando who, according to Yaffe, came to prominence with On the Waterfront (1954), missing by the best part of a decade his volcanic performance as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which made him a household name. Speaking of the emotional ...”

“... that not to meet the Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he couldn’t address a word to her except through Tynan: ‘Would you ask the princess what she thinks of …’ Tynan himself wanted to postpone his ...”

“... names before the House Un-American Activities Committee) in On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando as a longshoreman who risks his life by breaking ranks and denouncing the mob; while the counter-view of denunciation as betrayal was presented in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955), the story of a docker who turns in his wife’s ...”

“... really about violence at all, but about knowhow and determination and competition – we think of Marlon Brando getting the speed to return to his broken hand in One-Eyed Jacks. Munny doesn’t get any skill back, he just gets a big gun, and takes the town by surprise. We are also not displeased to see Little Bill get blown away, because he is a law ...”

“... Now, John Milius, has said that the character of Kurtz, the maniacal American officer played by Marlon Brando, was inspired by Rheault. Ellsberg was enraged by all the lies Resor proffered in his defence and by the comments of various Congressmen on how bad it would be for morale should American troops face criminal charges ‘just for killing one ...”

“... falling for the Jewish girl – as a moral education in the same way, for example, that the Marlon Brando character is educated in On the Waterfront. That would be the convention, and one I’d so much taken for granted that I kept looking in the Malle film for signs of this instruction in the school of life beginning to happen. But it ...”

“... In Cold Blood, it is possible that he would now be famous merely for his New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, ‘The Duke in His Domain’, which is a masterpiece, and maybe the movie of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The letters, on the other hand, are superb. He is funny about his fame. He is only 22 when he writes: ‘There is a morbid photograph of me ...”

“... of proportion to the rest of his body – and as unsafe. ‘Laurence Olivier is less gifted than Marlon Brando,’ wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to ...”

“... labourers, schoolchildren, office workers, and street gangs pretending they are riding with Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking, quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during ...”

“... which include the lead in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder had written it with him in mind) and the Marlon Brando part in On the Waterfront. Meeting Clift gave Taylor a vision of an acting life in which she could call some of the shots.Taylor’s parents were both Americans – her father, Francis, was an art dealer – but they were living in London when ...”

“... She dated O’Neal before What’s Up, Doc?, introducing him to Bogdanovich, and made friends with Marlon Brando (he asked to fuck her; she asked if he had got his teeth capped). She may have slept with Warren Beatty – ‘I guess I did. Probably once.’ She met the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at a London premiere and nearly married him after ...”

“... Hare’s dialogue for Saigon, Year of the Cat. When I asked him why, he said: ‘Can you imagine Marlon sticking to the text?’ Forrest had been in Apocalypse Now, and had watched Brando climbing palm trees in the Philippines and throwing coconuts at Coppola. When in the heat of filming I asked Forrest what Coppola would ...”

“... mug: good bones, a nicely shaped head, straight nose, brown eyes, full mouth. A bit like the young Marlon Brando, in fact, especially around the eyes. In this good fortune, he took after the men on my mother’s side of the family. Me, I got stuck with the other. In retrospect, for someone that good-looking and wild, he didn’t have a lot of girlfriends ...”