For the generation of cinemagoers who came of age in the 1950s, Marlon Brando was role model, icon and high priest. He had the fortune to arrive in Los Angeles when Hollywood was entering a period of serious movie-making. He had the talent to embrace the first half-dozen roles offered to him and he put an indelible personal stamp on each of them.

He exuded a new kind of male sexuality, rough and sweating, as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The Brando uniform of white T-shirt, often grubby, and jeans, often torn, became de rigueur for males in America and later in Europe. Some have even credited Brando with inventing the combination.

In the title role of Viva Zapata (1952) he fought against injustice and in The Wild One (1954), wearing another uniform, this time of black leathers, he took arms against bourgeois values. That low-budget film was effective enough in its rebelliousness to fall foul of the censors, especially in Britain, mainly on the ground that the gang of bikers, led by Brando’s Johnny, was not seen to be punished sufficiently by the time the final reel came round.

For a time Brando specialised in playing men who broke society’s rules. He also spawned a new school of actors, many of them trained in — or imitating — the Stanislavsky-inspired Method. Without Brando there would probably have been no James Dean, perhaps no Al Pacino. When he was cast as Mark Antony alongside John Gielgud and James Mason in the film of Julius Caesar (1953) there was much derision. But Brando proved worthy of the part and silenced a good number of the sneerers. His theatre schooling under the likes of Stella Adler stood him in good stead.

His screen career reached its apex in the role of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954). Again he was a rebel against injustice, but this time the enemy were the mobsters of New York’s docklands.

Surrounded by actors of the calibre of Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger, whose style, nurtured by the Group Theatre, accorded with Brando’s own, he shone as a good man in a dirty world. Most important of all, he had the directorial input of Elia Kazan, who knew how to handle Brando as few other film-makers did.

After On The Waterfront the Brando reputation slumped for almost 20 years. Films rolled out at regular intervals: some were entertaining and others were outright failures. None truly exploited his talent.

Few Hollywood superstars suffered such an eclipse. The critics who had once vied with one another with superlatives turned against him, and Brando likewise against them.

He became “difficult” and reclusive, more likely to appear on the news pages espousing the cause of an ethnic minority or squabbling over alimony than in the showbusiness section. His waistline expanded considerably while his hair thinned. The icon still hung on the wall, but only for the nostalgically inclined.

In 1972, The Godfather changed that. Brando fought hard to win the part of Don Corleone — Paramount had wanted Olivier — and once he got it he proved his worth. He was also in a box-office hit after a number of films which had shown little or no return. It was immediately followed by Last Tango in Paris (1972), which ran foul of the censors as The Wild One had two decades previously.

But this time round the aura of sexual explicitness, and sadism in particular, did Last Tango no harm at all. Under Bertolucci’s direction Brando towered over the film and certainly eclipsed his now forgotten co-star Maria Schneider. Briefly he was back in favour among the intellectuals.

It did not last long. After the chaotic The Missouri Breaks (1976) Brando appeared to content himself with cameo parts, often in big budget productions for either television or the cinema. Roots and Apocalypse Now (both 1979) were among them. The budgets had to be high because Brando’s appearance fees were considerable: he worked when he felt the need to add a few noughts to his bank account. Most notoriously, he was paid $3 million for his ten-minute appearance in Superman (1978), and he then sued for a share of the gross.

Many explanations have been offered for Brando’s slide from eminence. He did not age gracefully in the way of, say, Paul Newman or Britain’s clutch of theatrical knights who never gave up or gave in. Richard Schickel, the most perceptive of Brando’s several biographers, has suggested that he never felt the true compulsion to go on acting and simply “drifted into self-absorption”.