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“... going to ruin everything.’ That’s one way of reading the impact that the triumvirate of Clift, Brando and Dean had on Hollywood. Of course, there had been great actors before, but there had been few among the men who were renowned for intensity, for ‘sincerity’. Passion and performance were for women. For men, effortlessness and dignity were the ...”

“... Runyon would later base one of his most dreamy-eyed character-confections, ‘The Sky’ – or Marlon Brando in the film of Guys and Dolls. Sky Masterson is Runyon’s fugitive ideal. As a sportswriter, and as a close-up hanger-on of gangsters and tycoons, Runyon was in the business of constructing heroes, but none of the heavyweight boxers he ...”

“... at times uncertain. Mysteriously, he confuses literature with Catherine Deneuve, and suspects that Marlon Brando died in his place. Unhinged from the workaday world in the manner of Stephen Dedalus, yet given to free association in the style of Leopold Bloom, he sets out from his native Barcelona on a trip to Ireland in search of his long-buried self. His ...”

“... in writing about the film business (he has produced good books on Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando in the past). He does his best to like Bogart and Bacall, though he seems a little perplexed by the discovery that they were difficult people, even pains in the neck. Who knows how many readers will care now about their curious, brief ...”

“... play A Flag Is Born, which opened on Broadway in 1946 with a cast including Paul Muni and Marlon Brando. After the United Nations proposed the partition of Palestine in late 1947, the Attlee government decided to leave the inhabitants to find a solution. In a bitter war, the Zionists – Israelis once the state was proclaimed in May 1948 ...”

“... Allen Tate and Djuna Barnes, who also lived on Patchin Place, as Theodore Dreiser once had and Marlon Brando later would. He had become well regarded as an experimental poet, but he hadn’t yet become famous. Then, in 1931, he visited the USSR and was horrified by what he saw. His disenchantment with communism and frankness about it was not well ...”

“... Dean,’ Franco says, ‘I’m James Dean. Actors sniff jackets. Actors act, actors sniff jackets. Marlon Brando sniffed jackets.’ Franco tore himself down in more serious ways as well. In July 2008, he filmed Erased James Franco (the title is a nod to Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning) with the artist Carter, whose previous work consisted largely of ...”

“... Sartre. François Mauriac, three years away from his Nobel Prize, was in the audience. So was Marlon Brando. After the concert he gave Gréco a ride home on his motorbike. ‘Si tu t’imagines,’ indeed.But the song isn’t a wish-upon-a-star fantasy. ‘Imagine’, here, is used in its finger-wagging, admonitory sense: you’ve got another think ...”

“... On the Waterfront, where union corruption is only defeated after Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, plucks up the courage to ... fink. Navasky pours scorn on this movie, as if sensing how much it damages his case. There’s little point in enumerating some of the minor errors in Naming Names: its omission of Philip Dunne, who helped found ...”

“... to The Nightcomers (1971), a characteristically lurid offering from Michael Winner in which Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham take on the roles of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in a sleazy, sex-filled prequel to James’s novella. Young rightly devotes several pages to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, but Offbeat passes over it as being too well ...”

“... scene reminded me of, then I realised: it’s taken straight from the moment in The Godfather when Marlon Brando gathers the heads of the New York clans to discuss business. Tarantino repeats the device when Lucy Liu meets the Yakuza heads in Kill Bill – it’s a trope in gangster movies. I doubt this is coincidence. Putin’s PR men dress him like a ...”

“... to fend for themselves. Gielgud was never out of work, unlike his Julius Caesar co-star the late Marlon Brando, who made a fabulous cult of his non-appearance on stage, and whose indolence and contempt for the business causes Gielgud to look like a worker bee, making regular honey at no great expense to the spirit. ...”

“... of student, a President of the Oxford Union on a debating tour. He mingled with Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Sartre – and, most amusingly, with John Lennon, who rightly urged him ‘to get those left-wing students out, to talk to the workers. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel, a Marx, a Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were ...”

“... room, I wrote the last sentence of the novel Burr.’ The supporting cast in this séance included Marlon Brando, Greta Garbo, André Gide, the Beat poets, the Kennedys and the Sitwells. To follow a triumphant vanity production like Palimpsest with an authorised biography is a bit too-too. It’s as if Vidal were commissioning a monument to fit inside the ...”

“... in Tynan’s work as in Gilliatt’s. She writes of the film persona of Burt Lancaster or Marlon Brando or Sean Connery, all actors she likes to watch, as though these are nevertheless people we all know, and don’t have to fawn on. She never suggests she has any privileged knowledge of them off the screen, and what emerges of her ...”