Nearly 30 years ago, Marlon Brando exploded on the Broadway stage as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Since then he has become the leading movie actor of his generation. Some of his films have been good; more have been awful. No matter. Audiences could always count on Brando for performances that were surprising, overwhelming in their power, sometimes perversely idiosyncratic—his foppish Mr. Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, for example. At the very least, there was always an unforgettable moment or two, like the garden scene in The Godfather in which he mugs for his grandchild. Brando loves to mug in real life too, as the pictures taken on The Missouri Breaks set show (see color page).
Over the years he has become a figure somewhat larger than life. Among his colleagues he has no peer. "He gave us our freedom," says Jack Nicholson. Brando himself is stubborn about his freedom—to champion unpopular causes, to choose his own scripts and, above all, to lead a very private life on the island of Tetiaroa, 30 miles north of Tahiti. There last week, TIME Correspondent Leo Janos became the first American journalist to interview Brando in his isolated tropical paradise.
"My first impulse," Brando later admitted, "was to run like hell and disappear into the bush. My second was to turn you upside down and plant you, head first, like a coconut tree." Janos spent two days with Brando on the island and escaped without being planted. His report:
Beyond the sand bar, where we had walked the skiff over the shoals at the end of a languorous afternoon, the wind freshened suddenly ahead of a curtain of rain. The usually placid tropical lagoon hurled water into the skiff. The three of us were drenched. Willie, a local fisherman, grinned at the adventure. Our hulking captain frowned, grabbed a bucket and handed one to me. Brando read my fear. "Don't worry," he shouted. "When the rain hits, it will flatten the sea... the weight of the rain water." Our boat sped into the wall of rain; the sea flattened, and a few minutes later we beached the boat on the white sands of a small, S-shaped island—Brando's bird sanctuary.
There are very few birds left on the Polynesian islands because of the local practice of collecting eggs and selling them at market. Brando plans to turn this island over to the French government as a sanctuary. I followed him as he waded hip-deep into a shallow lagoon. Brando dropped into the water floating on his back; I did likewise. A brilliant rainbow arched over the island. Above us were hundreds of wheeling birds and an early halfmoon. Our bodies turned slowly in the warm water until we faced the lowering sun. Brando smiled impishly. "Just a typical day's end in paradise," he said.