Read on Twitter
So, you may already know this, but when they worked together on the Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy (who played Blanche!) did not get along.
Brando was difficult to act alongside for several reasons: He was really unprofessional, he was unpredictable & wouldn't commit to choices from night to night, and he was also just obviously better than everyone else.
Karl Malden found it infuriating to act w/ Brando because he would change the rhythms of his delivery at every rehearsal and performance, robbing his scene partners of comfort and rhythm, but Malden, unlike Tandy, felt it was a challenge that made his own acting improve.
Tandy called Brando "an impossible, psychopathic bastard" if you want some sense of how well things went. Anyway, after STreetcar opened, Brando decided to apologize to Tandy for his behavior and it went very poorly which led to a very famous exchange of letters.
Tandy, and English actress, wants to reform Brando and make him more like an English actor because she can see he is a genius and is worried he will waste his talent. I've read this exchange many times because it's in my book, but a new thing struck me today.
here's the paragraph I'm looking at from the letter... note WHY she says it's important to have proper speech and embrace the playwright's style, because Brando will have to play "Shakespeare, Sheridan, Goldoni, or, perhaps, Euripides"
This was an often-repeated complaint about method actors, that they couldn't do "the classics." But! The classics was a much broader body of work at the time AND took up way more of the available jobs for actors, both in the US and elsewhere.
You would NEVER today at a curriculum meeting at a drama school say "I'm worried our alumna won't be able to act Goldoni or Sheridan!"
At that moment, early 1948, the group of people doing Streetcar at the precipice of a *major* shift in American theater and none of them can see it! It's wild!
BTW, re: the often-voiced complaint about Method actors and the classics, one method acting teacher said to me "Maybe they're right! So what! The Brits can't do Williams!"
