On July 19 1947, the producer Irene Selznick drew up a contract for the 34-year-old John Garfield, one of the few sexy Hollywood stars with a proletarian pedigree, to play Stanley Kowalski in the debut of A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. The Selznick office leaked the big news to the press. The contract was never signed. On August 18 the deal with Garfield collapsed.

Selznick, feeling “low as a snake,” immediately started turning over other Hollywood options. Richard Conte, Dane Clark, Cameron Mitchell, Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster were mooted. “I HAVE GARFIELD-ITIS IN CHEST AND THROAT. OIVAY,” she wired Irving Schneider, her business manager, signing herself “Polyanna”. Then, on August 29, a name that didn’t appear on any of her extensive casting lists was being wired to Selznick at her Summit Avenue home in Beverly Hills: Marlon Brando.

Brando, who was 23 years old, had appeared without much critical attention in five Broadway plays. He was a beautiful, brooding specimen: mercurial, rebellious and rampant. Like Stanley, he was a ruthless man-child with reservoirs of tenderness and violence.

“That boy’s having a convulsion!”

A year before on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, which Elia Kazan co‑produced and which Harold Clurman directed, Brando stopped the show with a five-minute ‘murder monologue’. According to Clurman, who claimed the audience applauded him at the curtain call for a full minute, Brando “was never better at any time later” – a judgement that could hardly be contradicted since Truckline Café lasted only 13 performances.

None the less, another witness to Brando’s memorable, ferocious psychic explosion, the critic Pauline Kael, thought to herself: “That boy’s having a convulsion! Then I realised he was acting.” Brando wasn’t trying to act, at least not in the hidebound acting tradition hitherto practised on the American stage.

“There was nothing you could do with Brando that touched what he could do with himself,” Kazan said. “In those days he was a genius. His own preparation for a scene, his own personality, armament, memories and desires were so deep that there was very little you had to do, except tell him what the scene was about.”

Brando’s acting style was the performing equivalent of jazz. The notes were there, but Brando played them in a way that was uniquely personal to him. In his ability to call out of dialogue a heightened sense of emotional truth, the freedom of his stage behaviour was mesmerising and revolutionary. Instead of making everything learned and clear, Brando let the lines play on him and rode his emotions wherever they led him.

Acting on impulse

“He even listened experientially,” Kazan said. “It’s as if you were playing on something. He didn’t look at you, and he hardly acknowledged what you were saying. He was tuned in to you without listening to you intellectually or mentally. It was a mysterious process… There was always an element of surprise in what he did.”

By turns charming, witty, wounded, cruel – Brando presented the public with an immediacy that seemed unworked out; his reliance on impulse made him unpredictable and therefore dangerous. For both actor and audience the experience was a submersion in emotional contradiction. “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people,” Tennessee Williams wrote to Kazan when negotiations with Selznick seemed to have broken down, “Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.” Brando incarnated this ambivalence, and made it sensational.

Over the years, as the legend of his performance as Stanley grew from its initial mixed critical response to what The New York Times in his obituary called “epochal”, many theatricals took credit for casting him. Audrey Wood claimed it was her husband William Liebling; with more justification, Kazan maintained it was him; Brando insisted that Harold Clurman planted the idea in Kazan’s head.

A shot in the dark

“Gadg [Kazan’s nickname] and Irene both said I was probably too young, and she was especially unenthusiastic about me,” Brando recalled in his autobiography. After pondering the script for a few days, even Brando called Kazan to decline the role. The part, he felt, was “a size too large”. “The line was busy,” Brando said. “Had I spoken to him at that moment, I’m certain I wouldn’t have played the role. I decided to let it rest for a while and the next day he called me and said: ‘Well, what is it – yes or no?’ I gulped and said ‘Yes’.”