Cinematic Crush: Marlon Brando

For generations of aspiring actors, one name is all that is needed to epitomize the greatness they all desire: Brando.

And desire was the name of the streetcar that delivered Marlon Brando to fame on the Broadway stage. Women were known to gasp aloud when he, as the brutal Stanley Kowalski, removed his shirt onstage. It was if they could sense from the audience all that pent-up, raw sexuality exuding out of him. No wonder they swooned.

Naturally, Hollywood soon called for the young actor, and put up with his "method" for they knew he had the look that sold tickets. Despite its controversial themes, the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire proved them right, netting Brando his first of four Oscar nominations in a row, culminating in a win for his sensitive, tortured Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

In between those two iconic roles was another, less heralded but equally important one: The Wild One. As Johnny Strabler, Brando created the archetypal motorcycle tough who, when asked what he's rebelling against, replies curtly yet meaningfully "What do you got?"

Many movies followed, some legendary (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), some not (Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Island of Dr. Moreau). But it is those early films that captured that lightning in a bottle, that animalistic machismo those women sitting in that theater back in 1947 must have felt. And we can still feel it today.

See more pictures of Marlon Brando in The Back Room (NSFW).