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By 1971, Marlon Brando was considered a has-been. Once the most electrifying actor of his generation, a decade of box office flops and a reputation for being difficult on set had made studios wary of hiring him at all. When director Francis Ford Coppola wanted him for The Godfather, Paramount executives fought the decision every … Read more

Marlon Brando spent his career playing men consumed by rage, guilt, and grief. In his final decades, he lived through a family tragedy so devastating that no performance could have prepared him for it. What happened inside his Mulholland Drive estate in 1990 would haunt him, and his family, for the rest of his life. … Read more

Marlon Brando was one of the most private public figures in Hollywood history, and nowhere was that more true than in his family life. Behind the legendary performances was a household that, at times, included more than a dozen children from a string of different relationships. Brando almost never discussed it publicly. What emerges from … Read more

In May 1955, Grace Kelly traveled to the Cannes Film Festival for a magazine photo shoot she nearly skipped entirely. By the end of the year, Hollywood’s reigning leading lady would trade her film career for a crown, and she would never make another movie again. It remains one of the most extraordinary real-life fairy … Read more

1955 might be the single most extraordinary year any actress has ever had. Grace Kelly won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Months later, at a magazine photo shoot she almost didn’t attend, she met the man she would marry. Few careers have ended on a higher note, or in a stranger sequence of events, … Read more

On September 13, 1982, Princess Grace of Monaco set off on a familiar drive down the winding mountain roads above the principality, roads she had traveled countless times before. She would never complete the journey. The fairy tale that began with a magazine photo shoot in 1955 ended twenty-seven years later on a stretch of … Read more

James Dean never saw himself become a legend. When he died on September 30, 1955, only one of his three films had been released. The performance that would define him forever, Rebel Without a Cause, hadn’t even reached theaters yet. He was twenty-four years old, driving his brand-new Porsche to a road race in Salinas, … Read more

Most film icons need decades and dozens of roles to build a legacy. James Dean needed three films and less than eighteen months. It remains one of the strangest, most improbable facts in Hollywood history. Nearly seventy years after his death, his brief, blazing filmography continues to define what an entire generation of actors have … Read more

James Dean loved his new Porsche 550 Spyder so much that he gave it a nickname before he had even driven it a hundred miles. He called it Little Bastard. Days later, the car he was so proud of became the site of his death. The story of that car did not end with Dean’s … Read more

When a teenage Sophia Loren met producer Carlo Ponti at a beauty pageant in the early 1950s, he was already twenty-two years her senior and married to someone else entirely. What followed was a romance so complicated it forced the two of them to leave their own country just to legally become husband and wife. … Read more