In A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Marlon Brando plays Stanley Kowalski, the rough, passionate husband whose clash with his sister-in-law Blanche DuBois, played by Vivien Leigh, drives Tennessee Williams’s drama to its shattering end. Brando had already played Stanley on Broadway, and director Elia Kazan brought that stage power to the screen.
Stanley was unlike any leading man audiences had seen: physical, inarticulate, and terrifyingly alive. Brando’s performance, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, announced a new kind of screen realism, and it remains the role most closely linked with his name.
.jpg)