Marlon Brando, Part 2: The Wilderness Years — Guys and Dolls, Mutiny on the Bounty, and the Road to The Godfather

By the end of the 1950s, Marlon Brando had everything he had spent his career fighting for. An Oscar. Money. Power. His own production company. And the freedom to make films on his own terms.

Then he began discovering what complete freedom could cost.

Part 2 of our three-part series on Marlon Brando follows what came after Hollywood crowned the actor who changed movie acting — from Guys and Dolls and Sayonara to One-Eyed Jacks, the Western he took over from Stanley Kubrick and directed himself, and Mutiny on the Bounty, the troubled epic that helped transform his reputation from difficult genius into box-office liability.

It also follows a personal life becoming increasingly complicated: his marriage to Anna Kashfi, the custody battle over their son Christian, his relationships with Rita Moreno, Movita Castaneda, and Tarita Teriipaia, and Tahiti — the place where Brando began imagining a life beyond Hollywood.

As his career declined, his political activism deepened. Through his friendship with James Baldwin, the March on Washington, the civil-rights movement, and his growing commitment to Native American rights, Brando began searching beyond acting for the sense of purpose fame had never given him.

By the end of the 1960s, the actor once hailed as the future of Hollywood had become box-office poison.

Hollywood had decided Marlon Brando was finished.

Then came Don Corleone.

Part 3 of our Marlon Brando series — covering Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, his Oscar refusal, Superman, Apocalypse Now, and the long, complicated final decades of his life — releases next Tuesday, July 21.

Part 1 — covering Brando's childhood, his rise on Broadway, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, and On the Waterfront — is out now.

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When They Were Making It is written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Rankin. Original artwork by Simone Beech and original music by Lionel Ziblat.