One of the greatest acting legends of all time lived to be exactly 80 years old, but his legacy has inspired a countless number of people and will continue to live for many years to come. Oscar-winning Marlon Brando, who lived from April 3, 1924 to July 1, 2004, has had an incredible impact on the world of Hollywood and on the lives of actors of the next generation.

Marlon Brando had somewhat of a tumultuous childhood. He was born in Nebraska but grew up in California and Illinois. His parents, Marlon Brando, Sr. and Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, separated for a few years and then reconciled. Marlon was also expelled from schools on numerous occasions, and his parents were absent a lot of the time. His father was a traveling salesman and his mother, although a talented woman involved in local theater, suffered from alcoholism.

Marlon, who as a kid had an uncanny knack for impressions, eventually left Illinois for New York City to study at the American Theatre Wing Professional School, Actors’ Studio and New School Dramatic Workshop, where he studied with Stella Adler.

Marlon eventually made it to Broadway and achieved the popularity that is still celebrated in 1947 with his performance as Stanley Kowalski in the play A Streetcar Named Desire written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan. Three years later Brando gained further acclaim by playing Kowalski again in the screen adaptation of Streetcar, and ended up being nominated for an Academy Award for best actor. He was nominated yet again for follow-up roles he played in films such as Julius Caesar (1953) with James Mason and Louis Calhern, and On the Waterfront (1954) with Karl Malden and Lee J. Cobb—the latter for which he won an Oscar. Brando went on to star in a number of roles in the 1950s, but his acting energy started to ebb at the end of that decade and into the 1960s, and he began to build a reputation as a difficult actor in marginal movies.

However, that all changed when he took on major roles as mob head Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), alongside fellow actors Al Pacino, James Caan and Robert Duvall; as well as for portraying Jor-El, Superman’s father, in the first Superman film also co-starring Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman. 

Marlon was supposed to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for The Godfather, but turned it down.