Marlon Brando successful film, he won his second Academy Award for playing Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather", a role critics consider among his greatest. "The Godfather" was then one of the most commercially successful films of all time. With that and his Oscar-nominated performance in "Last Tango in Paris", Brando re-established himself in the ranks of top box-office stars, placing sixth and tenth in the Money Making Stars poll in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Brando took a four-year hiatus before appearing in "The Missouri Breaks" (1976). After this, he was content with being a highly paid character actor in
Marlon Brando Illinois, a small town north of Chicago. In 1939 and 1941, he worked as an usher at the town's only movie theatre, The Liberty. Brando, whose childhood nickname was "Bud", was a mimic from his youth. He developed an ability to absorb the mannerisms of kids he played with and display them dramatically while staying in character. He was introduced to neighborhood boy Wally Cox and the two were unlikely closest friends until Cox's death in 1973. In the 2007 TCM biopic, "Brando: The Documentary", childhood friend George Englund recalls Brando's earliest acting as imitating the cows and horses on