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For the last 25 years, Brando's girth loomed as large as his legend. In the mid-1990s, he reportedly tipped the scales at 400 pounds.

Weight, age and agonizing family dramas marginalized the movie-star looks that brought him beefcake status in the 1950s ("He's a walking hormone factory," a producer said of him then). But Brando's reputation, though sullied in stinkers like The Island of Dr. Moreau, was never really marginalized. For 2001's The Score, he received $3 million for just three weeks worth. Even in down times (and despite dismissively referring to director Frank Oz as "Miss Piggy"), the Brando brand name was still gold.

"Brando is just the best actor in the world today," director Elia Kazan said in 1954.

In Brando's prime, Kazan's sentiment found few detractors.

From his 1950 film debut, as a damaged WWII vet in The Men, to 1954's Waterfront, as a compromised ex-boxer (under Kazan's direction), Brando appeared in six films, earned four consecutive Oscar nominations, won one Academy Award (for Waterfront) and saw his price-tag climb to a then-hefty $200,000 a picture.

Actor Jon Voight once described Brando's first six films as "absolutely enormous." They included: A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar and The Wild One. Only The Wild One and The Men failed to net Brando Oscar nods.

The excitement around Brando centered on his style. He didn't project. He mumbled. He didn't act. He inhabited--as was the way of the Method, the build-the-character-from-the-inside technique preached at New York's New School and the Actors' Studio.

Born April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, Marlon Brando Jr., a military school reject, studied at both places in the 1940s. At the Actors' Studio, in particular, he found himself at the proving ground for the new breed of post-World War II stars. Other distinguished alum of the era included Karl Malden, Marilyn Monroe and Rod Steiger.

But it was Brando who made the Method famous--first on Broadway, in 1947's career-making performance as "Stella!"-shouting brute Stanley Kowalski in the original production of Streetcar, and then on film.

In Viva Zapata!, he was the real-life Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. In Julius Caesar, he was Shakespeare's version of the principled Marc Antony. And in The Wild One, he was a force of nature--a leather-wearing, hog-riding, gang-leading bad boy.

But even as Brando was riding high in the early 1950s, there were signs he was ready to kill the engine. He said he did Hollywood movies only because he was too weak to turn down the money. He disliked fans. He disliked rehearsals. He disdained learning lines (the better to keep things spontaneous). He even professed to not like acting.

"Acting is just hustling," Brando told Playboy in 1979. "In your heart of hearts, you know perfectly well that movie stars aren't artists."

In short, the world was falling over itself in praise of Brando, and Brando didn't care (which, for the most part, only made the world fall over itself even more).

After his initial six-pack of hits, Brando went his own way--singing in Guys and Dolls, turning Japanese man for The Teahouse of the August Moon, donning a Nazi uniform in The Young Lions.

It was in the 1960s, though, that Brando truly began to separate himself from his audience, and Hollywood.

First, he directed the new-style Western One-Eyed Jacks (1961), then he went prima donna, reportedly making a tortuous production of an underwhelming version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

As Brando's social conscience grew (his chief issues being Native Americans and civil rights), his film choices grew curiouser and curiouser. John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), in which Brando played a sexually conflicted Army major, was, in a word, weird.

By the early 1970s, Hollywood's so-called "best actor" was unhirable. Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola had to lobby to get studio brass to even consider Brando as The Godfather's godfather. Brando won the role of Vito Corleone only after consenting to an audition and a paltry (by his former standards) $50,000 up-front paycheck.

Brando's turn as the mob boss (his cheeks stuffed with Kleenex) gave rise to a renaissance in the 1970s. He was a leading man again (albeit of a darker sort) in Last Tango in Paris. He was Superman's father Jor-El in Superman (a role for which he was paid considerably more than $50,000). And he was the mysterious Colonel Kurtz in Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

He was a 1979 Emmy for portraying American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in the mini-series, Roots: The Next Generation.

Arguably, Brando gave very little in the way of memorably good performances in the last two decades. He did, however, give many memorably odd performances--in The Score and Moreau, among others.

In 1990, he parodied his Don Corleone self in The Freshman. He earned his last Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, for 1989's A Dry White Season.

Brando's personal life was as turbulent as his career. He married and divorced three times, to the actresses Tarita Teriipia, Movita and Anna Kashfi. He engaged in a bitter custody battle with Kashfi over eldest son Christian. In 1990, Christian shot and killed the lover of half-sister Cheyenne at Brando's Los Angeles home. Christian served nearly five years in prison. Cheyenne committed suicide in 1995.

In April 2002, Brando's former maid, Maria Cristina Ruiz, filed a $100 million breach-of-contract lawsuit against the actor, saying it was her de-facto divorce petition after 14 non-married years and three children together.

In 1996, Brando proved he still had the ability to shock, kissing the host of Larry King Live! and talking bluntly about how "Hollywood is run by Jews."

He expounded on other topics in his 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me. The book was no small feat for a man who had long talked about how much he disliked talking about himself.

"I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can," he wrote, "so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me..."