Brando is perpetually fascinating, both for the power of the characters he portrayed and for his tumultuous personal life. Bestselling biographer Stefan Kanfer seamlessly intertwines the man and the work to give us the fullest and most illuminating appraisal yet. Kanfer takes us from Brando's troubled childhood to his arrival in New York in the 1940s, where he studied with the legendary Stella Adler and became, at age twenty-three, the star of Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire. He looks at each of Brando's films, offering a detailed analysis of his performances that shows the evolution of Brando's singular genius. He brings into focus Brando's self-destructiveness, his ambivalence toward his craft, and the tragedies that shadowed his last years. What emerges is a definitive life of an iconic artist whose work forever altered the landscape of his craft.
Armando Dur‡n admirably performs the heavy labor of narrating the prose and occasionally quoting and inflecting the tone of one of cinema's most quoted leading men. Overall, Dur‡n succeeds in orally evoking images of Marlon Brando, though he does occasionally falter--and these moments are temporarily distracting. Nonetheless, his deliberate and articulate delivery maintains good rhythm and emphasis in executing Kanfer's solid and compelling biography. With his own deliberateness, Kanfer traces Brando's life from beginning to end, paying close attention to the motivations and influences of the actor, who far exceeded expectations but never quite reached his potential. The accessible and enjoyable prose of Kanfer and the deep, steady voice Dur‡n will strike any listener as compelling. L.E. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
About the Author
STEFAN KANFER, a writer and editor at Time magazine for more than twenty years, is the author of the best-selling biographies Groucho and Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball. He has also written Stardust Lost, The Eighth Sin, A Summer World, The Last Empire, and Serious Business. Named a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and recipient of numerous writing awards, he is currently a contributing editor for City Journal.
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