Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951. From the Lester Glassner Collection/Neil Peters Collection.
No other actor has ever rocketed to overnight stardom on the Broadway stage as Marlon Brando did in 1947, in Tennessee Williams's steamy play A Streetcar Named Desire. There have been some memorable debuts in the American theater—I still remember Elia Kazan, the director of Streetcar, in his acting days, shouting "Strike!" at the curtain of Clifford Odets's stirring agitprop play Waiting for Lefty in 1935—but nothing will ever compare to the explosion set off by Brando in his savage portrayal of Stanley Kowalski, the brutal blue-collar tormentor of his defenseless sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, who has come to take refuge with him and his wife. I will never forget the impact Brando had on me and the rest of the audience. This was beyond a performance. It was so raw, so real, that you wanted to run up onto the stage and save the poor woman from his taunting abuse as he ri