Screen icon Marlon Brando has died in Los Angeles, aged 80.
Brando pictured in the Godfather
The cause of death was not immediately known, but he has suffered from heart disease for the past number of years.
Regarded by many as the greatest actor of his generation, Brando was the original angry young man of cinema. His electrifying performances in A Streetcar Named Desireand On The Waterfrontwere unlike anything Hollywood had seen before.
Two decades on his Oscar-winning role in The Godfathersealed his status as a screen legend. But Brando's life was marred by tragedy, and his later years were a tale of sad decline.
He became a recluse, and his rare film appearances were overshadowed by tales of his eccentric behaviour on set. The one-time sex symbol became grossly overweight, his brooding good looks a distant memory.
Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 3rd 1924, to a salesman father and amateur actress mother. The actor remembered his childhood growing up on a farmstead as an unhappy one. His father, Marlon Sr, was a womaniser and disciplinarian prone to violent rages while his mother, Dodie, whom he adored, was an alcoholic.
He was a wayward teen and was expelled from several academic institutions, including military academy. Aged 19, he moved to New York with his mother, intent on becoming an actor, and enrolled at Elia Kazan's Actors' Studio. There he studied method acting, the discipline which requires performers to draw on their own experiences and emotions to create a character, and became its most famous exponent.
After a few small parts he landed the lead in a Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, playing Stanley Kowalski. His performance caused a sensation and set a new benchmark for actors - one critic wrote that Brando displayed "a delicate ferocity unlike any acting I had ever seen".
He made his screen debut as an embittered paraplegic in The Menin 1950, a role for which the 26-year-old was reported to have prepared by lying in bed for a month in a veterans' hospital.
In 1951 he appeared in the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desireand became a Hollywood star.