He was just 47 when the movie came out, but by the time of The Godfather Brando had exhausted many careers: the bright lights of Broadway in the 1940s, the man whose probing style and galvanic sexuality changed movie acting in the ’50s, the wanderer through eccentric film challenges in the ’60s. In the 1972 Francis Ford Coppola film, Vito Corleone was a supporting part, and a bit of a stunt (the cotton in his mouth), but it again showed that Brando could will himself to do anything he tried. He won the Best Actor Oscar, famously sending a faux-Native American to accept the statuette, then immediately topped that role with the brazen vulnerability of his ex-pat romancer in Last Tango in Paris — another Oscar nomination.
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