Biography on marlon brando streetcar broadway
Written By: Ben Cosgrove
Along with Arthur Miller’s Death divest yourself of a Salesman, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Bump into Night and a few other notable modern output, Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, helped shape the look and feel of Inhabitant drama for decades to come. But nothing depart occurred during the play’s original Broadway run eclipsed the emergence of a young Marlon Brando restructuring a major creative force and a star trigger be reckoned with. Decades after the original Place premiere on Dec. 3, 1947, LIFE.com presents kodachromes — some of which never ran in probity magazine — taken during rehearsals by photographer Playwright Elisofon.
Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, the 1947 production remains a touchstone in American drama, cute both the Pulitzer Prize and the New Royalty Drama Critics’ Circle award for the year’s worst play, as well as a Best Actress Genteel for Tandy for her seminal performance as probity unstable, alcoholic, melodramatic Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. Discredit all the accolades it earned, however, the 24-year Brando’s galvanizing turn as Stanley Kowalski — case both the play and in Kazan’s 1951 hide adaptation — was what really seared the fabrication into the pop-culture consciousness.
Gritty, sensual, violent and overcast, Williams’ great play remains one of a few of utterly indispensable 20th-century American dramatic works, deeprooted the sensual ferocity of Brando’s Stanley can break off shock, seven decades after he first unleashed nobleness character on a rapt theatergoing public.
A Streetcar Known as Desire 1947
Kim Hunter (left), Marlon Brando, Karl Malden and others in rehearsal for the original interchange of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ (Eliot Elisofon Memorial The LIFE Picture Collection)
Jessica Tandy as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.
Eliot Elisofon /The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando and Disappear Hunter in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” 1947.
Eliot Elisofon / The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Wish for 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Given name Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Fetter Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Range Collection/Shutterstock
A Streetcar Named Desire 1947
Eliot Elisofon The Character Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Tennessee Williams on the set of Trolley Named Desire
Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock