LOS ANGELES, July 2 (UPI) -- The perfect red rose left Friday on Marlon Brando's star on the touristy Hollywood Walk of Fame was a perfect symbol of the arms-length love affair between the acting legend and the industry that made him what he was.
The flower left in tribute to Brando after his death of lung failure at age 80 was an equal part of the beauty of the natural talent he brought to the screen and the thorny relationship he had with Hollywood.
"Marlon would have hated the idea of people commenting on his death," director Francis Ford Coppola said in a written statement. "I'll just say, 'I'll miss him.'"
Coppola directed what was arguably Brando's most pivotal role as Vito Corleone, the don of the fictional Corleone crime family in the 1972 classic "The Godfather."
"The Godfather" won the Oscar for best picture that year while Brando was named the year's best actor for his starring role in the film that went on to spawn a pair of successful sequels and become one of Hollywood's best franchises.
The film also nailed down the status of Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and James Caan as the leaders of that generation's most-promising stars.
But Brando himself refused to be embraced by the success of "The Godfather," and in a move scorned by many at the time as a snub of Hollywood, he refused to accept the award. When his name was announced on gala Oscar night, Brando wasn't there and instead sent an actress in buckskin finery to the podium to turn down the coveted statuette in protest of the perceived ill treatment of American Indians.
Stiffing Hollywood is something an artist does at his or her own peril; the old saying "You'll never work in this town again" didn't come out of thin air in a town once ruled by the moguls and now firmly under the control of corporate dictators who are not always benevolent.
In 1972, gestures of social protest were carried out amid the divisive tension of Vietnam and the civil-rights movement, and blowing off Hollywood's version of the Super Bowl over a then-obscure issue amounted to a slap in the face of another American institution.
Hollywood could have easily decided that Brando was too hot to handle and exiled him to the dreaded gates of obscurity in order to mollify the target audiences in Peoria and other points east of Malibu. After all, he wasn't vital to the second "Godfather" since his character had dropped dead in his tomato patch in the original film.
Brando, however, was simply too big a talent to be ignored. After starring in 1972's steamy "Last Tango in Paris," Brando led a cast of soon-to-be all stars in "The Missouri Breaks," a somewhat brutish western that also featured Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid and Harry Dean Stanton.
Through his skills and standing as an actor, Brando was able to serve as a bridge between the Nicholson generation of brooding and flawed artists and the previous generation of leading men that had once included Ronald Reagan.
Many critics say it was "A Streetcar Named Desire," with Brando's full-throttle portrayal of neighborhood tough guy Stanley Kowalski, that thrust grittiness and the emotions of method acting into the forefront of Hollywood.
"The whole thing up until then was proper -- Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Van Johnson -- and along comes Brando," actor Anthony Quinn later told the Los Angeles Times. "The character of Stanley (stuck it to) them all."
The heart and soul that Brando poured into his roles turned Hollywood upside down as his talent made the old standards of rakish good looks and the measured recitation of lines seem bland and symptomatic of a studio system that churned out far more forgettable reels than classics.
Laurence Olivier, who had been up against Brando for Best Actor in 1972, was quoted in the Times describing him as an actor "with an empathy and an instinctual understanding that not even the greatest technical performers could possibly match."
The realism of the anti-leading man was seen in the likes of John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart; however, they largely played themselves onscreen, while Brando delivered memorable characters the likes of Kowalski, Don Vito, Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" and Johnny, the rebellious young biker in "The Wild One," a portrayal of the takeover of Hollister, Calif., by crowds of rowdy motorcycle riders over, coincidently, the July 4 weekend in 1947.
When asked in the film what he was rebelling against, the sullen Johnny replies, "What have you got?"
It was a line meant to signify the growing restlessness of post-war youth, and although often confused with James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause," it symbolically signaled the beginning of the end of the Hollywood in which movie stars were just another pretty face.
Brando spent a large part of his latter years ensconced in his Tahiti retreat and turning in a series of scattered and largely throwaway roles, possibly with the exception of the classic Col. Kurtz and the underrated spoof of himself as a velvety mob godfather in "The Freshman." He once candidly admitted, "I did those films for the money."
By the time he died, Brando was a classic Hollywood eccentric: reclusive, scornful of the business in general and taking delight in not even trying to maintain his image as a movie star. He probably didn't even give into the temptation to go under the knife to carve a few years off his face.
But Hollywood has never been such a closed club that it would say "good riddance" to someone like Brando. The stars of the day will be pouring on the tributes to a man many of them consider a role model this weekend, while the fans who knew his name as well as their own leave a growing pile of sentiments on the star-studded sidewalk near the famed intersection of Hollywood and Vine.
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