Brando

Actor Marlon Brando's daughter Cheyenne -- the troubled, onetime model whose half-brother killed her lover in the movie star's sprawling Hollywood Hills home -- has committed suicide in Tahiti, officials said yesterday.Cheyenne Brando, who had been in seclusion for months, hanged herself at her home on the South Pacific island, authorities said. Friends said she had suffered from depression since Christian Brando fatally shot Dag Drollet in a 1990 case that made news around the world. The 25-year-old actor's daughter reportedly had attempted suicide at least twice.

Karl Malden, an Academy Award-winning actor who excelled in plain-spoken, working-class roles, including the awkward Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire and a brave priest in On the Waterfront, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. No cause of death was immediately disclosed. He was 97. Mr. Malden's bulbous nose and thinning hair made him one of the most familiar sights in movies and on television for five decades. In the 1970s, he became known to millions of viewers as a police veteran who partners with a young inspector played by Michael Douglas on the ABC drama series The Streets of San Francisco.

By his professional methods and by his personal stands, the legendary actor was far ahead of his time. Marlon Brando's extraordinary emotional intelligence expressed itself in every inch of his body for every second - the phrase "being in the moment" might as well have been coined for him. Of course, other actors in New York and Hollywood had been as physically expressive as Brando (think Cagney) and as naturalistic (think Barbara Stanwyck). But Brando went deeper and further: his urgent sensitivity and imagination gave his performances a poetic dimension that transcended realism.

Series Chuck:: Scott Bakula and Chevy Chase guest star on a new episode. (8 p.m., WBAL-Channel 11) House:: The singer-actor known as Meat Loaf guest stars on a new episode of the medical drama. (8 p.m., WBFF-Channel 45) The Hills:: The reality series about the lives and loves of the young and vacuous returns. (10 p.m., MTV) Specials The Da Vinci Shroud:: Experts seek a connection between Leonardo da Vinci and the Shroud of Turin in this special. (9 p.m., Discovery) Movies The Wild One:: Turner Classic Movies kicks off a biker movie marathon with this 1954 classic starring Marlon Brando.

The most acclaimed actor of his generation, a proponent of controversial causes, a public figure who shuns the public gaze and, therefore, the subject of innumerable legends and rumors, Marlon Brando has written his autobiography in order to set the record straight.In "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me," he provides a detailed historical record of both his life and career, together with comments on some of the people who shaped his art and influenced his personality. Aside from his frequent pronouncements on more abstract subjects, such as psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy, however, his book reveals a good deal less than a reader might expect or even deserve.

What self-respecting film buff can't recall at least some of the details surrounding the 1960 remake of the adventure classic "Mutiny on the Bounty"? The movie itself may not have been all that memorable, but the saga of its leading man, Marlon Brando, and his subsequent love affair with French Polynesia caught the imagination of filmgoers.Mr. Brando solidified connections to the South Pacific with his marriage to his "Bounty" co-star, the extravagantly beautiful Tarita, and again several years later, when he purchased the palm-studded atoll of Tetiaroa ("far in the ocean")

An eight-week, eight-film tribute to the late Marlon Brando opens tomorrow at The Charles with Viva Zapata!, a 1952 film in which he portrays the man who rose from peasant origins to become leader of a Mexican revolution and, eventually, president of the country. The film, directed by Elia Kazan and written by John Steinbeck, is questionable history (the real Emiliano Zapata was not quite the noble figure Brando portrays). But the movie gave the 28-year-old Brando, in only his third film, quite the stage from which to display his range (he'd already left his mark on audiences with the previous year's A Streetcar Named Desire)

The point of no film review is to ridicule the appearance of one of its stars, particularly a star with a long and distinguished career behind him. That principle established, it still must be said, reluctantly, that in "Don Juan DeMarco," Marlon Brando has become so gigantic that the spectacle of his bloatedness actually interrupts one's ability to concentrate on the film.Under a blond wig that would look out of place on a professional wrestler, the overweight matinee idol, once the hope of a generation, is a pretty sorry sight.

Writer/director Jeremy Leven recognized it from 80 feet away. Everybody else will have to be content with recognizing it on the big screen in "Don Juan DeMarco," in which Marlon Brando plays a psychiatrist treating a delusional Johnny Depp, which opened last week."

By late 1957, Jack Kerouac was streaking from frustrated anonymity to literary stardom. On the Road had just been published, Subterraneans was due out in a few months and journalists were clamoring for interviews with the novelist who had suddenly become a spokesman for the Beat Generation. Kerouac could taste the riches he thought would come. And getting Hollywood's hottest actor, Marlon Brando, to star opposite him in a movie version of his novel would have sealed it. Or so he wrote in a one-page letter to Brando to be auctioned off next month in which Kerouac suggested he play narrator-alter ego Sal Paradise opposite Brando's Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac's real-life pal Neal Cassady.

Before yesterday's Maryland-California NCAA tournament game on CBS, if you had said the word vivacious, I likely would have pictured an actress such as, say, Isla Fisher (Confessions of a Shopaholic). But now, thanks to Tim Brando, that word has been carved into my memory as applying to the Terps' Greivis Vasquez, henceforth to be known as "The Vivacious Venezuelan." CBS' cameras and announcers Brando and Mike Gminski loved Vasquez, and the junior guard gave them plenty to love. For one thing, he made Brando look brilliant.

ETOSHA NATIONAL PARK, Namibia -- The huge bull elephant nicknamed "Marlon Brando" loped over to the water hole, big ears flapping in the breeze. Soon he and four huge bull underlings indulged in a spirited bath that darkened their gray girth. Buried in the sandy soil nearby, switched off at the moment, sat a device probably never before known in this remote stretch of southwest African wilderness: a ButtKicker subwoofer that gives many American home theaters their bone-rattling shake. Here, the device has led to groundbreaking discoveries about how Brando and his kind communicate.

Imagine Marlon Brando in his Mark Antony toga from Julius Caesar, astride the worlds of classical and modern acting like the Colossus of Rhodes. And then re-imagine him magnificent in ruins, still inspiring generations of actors with his emotional and imaginative reach, despite decades of paycheck performances and a personal life that would challenge the erotic powers of Henry Miller and the tragic breadth of Theodore Dreiser. Brando emerges in a spellbinding two-part documentary Brando, making its premiere Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Turner Classic Movies, as an alternately noble and self-indulgent personality who was nonetheless a Wonder of the World.

By late 1957, Jack Kerouac was streaking from frustrated anonymity to literary stardom. On the Road had just been published, Subterraneans was due out in a few months and journalists were clamoring for interviews with the novelist who had suddenly become a spokesman for the Beat Generation. Kerouac could taste the riches he thought would come. And getting Hollywood's hottest actor, Marlon Brando, to star opposite him in a movie version of his novel would have sealed it. Or so he wrote in a one-page letter to Brando to be auctioned off next month in which Kerouac suggested he play narrator-alter ego Sal Paradise opposite Brando's Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac's real-life pal Neal Cassady.

HOLLYWOOD - Interested in a pair of Marlon Brando sunglasses? How about some Brando decorative refrigerator magnets or a mouse pad? Brando shirts, pants, neckwear and underwear? Or would you care to lounge around the house in a Brando kimono? These are just some of the commercial products that the estate of the late, two-time Oscar-winning actor has listed in an application for U.S. trademark protection on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Mike Medavoy, a Hollywood producer and co-executor of the Brando estate, said many items were included in the filing simply as a precautionary measure.

Hollywood can have Grauman's Chinese Theater and Steven Spielberg, because Baltimore has the Senator Theatre and John Waters. And every few years, when the two join forces for a gala premiere, it's a beautiful thing. Tickets for the Senator's Sept. 14 U.S. premiere of Waters' A Dirty Shame, a tale of sex-crazed concussion victims who take over the Harford Road corridor, go on sale today at $100 a pop. For that C-note, lucky Baltimoreans will be among the first to see Waters' latest (it gets its world premiere two days earlier, at the Toronto Film Festival)

The horror! The horror! The fat! The fat!Somewhere, beyond the reach of civilization, someone has gone out of control and is breaking all bounds. It's Marlon Brando and he's -- AIEEEEEEEEEEE! -- doing his Sydney Greenstreet imitation.Big as the house that squashed the Wicked Witch of the East, occasionally painted white so that he resembles a big dish of wiggly vanilla pudding and offering a prissy Etonian accent that sounds just like Sir James M. Barrie's valet, Brando essays an impersonation that makes his jungle-mad Colonel Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now" seem like the very model of decorum.

Part I An American hero -- and antihero Beyond anything else, Marlon Brando is the towering original who came out of the Midwest 58 years ago and electrified Broadway and then Hollywood with the visceral excitement and veracity of his acting. He exploded propriety and expressed intimate yearnings with unprecedented nakedness and power, only to have studio executives try to cut him down to conventional stardom. Even now, he seesaws between living legend and butt of late-night jokes. Whenever another maverick is profiled or interviewed, Brando is apt to be invoked as a model or a friend.

An eight-week, eight-film tribute to the late Marlon Brando opens tomorrow at The Charles with Viva Zapata!, a 1952 film in which he portrays the man who rose from peasant origins to become leader of a Mexican revolution and, eventually, president of the country. The film, directed by Elia Kazan and written by John Steinbeck, is questionable history (the real Emiliano Zapata was not quite the noble figure Brando portrays). But the movie gave the 28-year-old Brando, in only his third film, quite the stage from which to display his range (he'd already left his mark on audiences with the previous year's A Streetcar Named Desire)

The World Islamic militants in Iraq released three Turkish captives that they earlier threatened to behead. Al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV news network, broadcast a videotape that it said showed the execution of Spc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, by Iraqi militants who had held him captive since April 9. Israel's Supreme Court ruled that part of the barrier the Israeli army is building in the West Bank illegally harms Palestinians by cutting them...