Marlon Brando was one of the most private superstars in modern times, who only stepped into the lime light to promote a new film or causes close to his heart. While several books exist based on that material, there has never been a personal biography with a first-hand view of the inner sanctum until George Englund's Marlon Brando: The Naked Actor. Having been repeatedly urged to write by Brando himself (as he had been given his first Hollywood break by Brando), Englund started this memoir in earnest a few months before Brando died on 1 July 2004 in order to capture the real Brando behind the star. Looking back in time, Englund writes down his incisive memories from when he befriended the young Marlon in 1954 then on the cusp of his meteoric rise as the sex symbol equivalent of Marilyn Monroe and the beginning of becoming a close confidant for almost fifty years from whom Brando sought frank advice. Englund draws on stories from Jackie Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe that only he and Brando knew. But he also shows how the seeds of decline and suspicion were there from the start. From the stories a young actor emerges who was beautiful in every way - driven by his instinctive talent to break new ground, athletic, muscular, seductive, intelligent and generous. Gradually, however, Brando turned into the very person whom he loathed his father and humiliated at every turn. Overweight and trying to diet on a regime of his own invention, he was overcome by inertia at the end of his life in all - even his famed powers of seduction - but his talent.