Marlon Brando at 100

Yet he remains unique and, more to the point, inescapable. This isn’t owing just to his talent, as astonishing as that was, or his beauty, and until middle age he was unnervingly beautiful, or even the heedlessness with which he treated both that talent and that beauty.

Brando’s uniqueness and inescapability are related to this idea of weather as acting, yet go so far beyond it. In addition to all the amazing meteorology he was himself responsible for — the storminess of Stanley Kowalski, the very different storminess of Terry Malloy, the reassuring chill of Vito Corleone, the moral drought that is Colonel Kurtz — Brando was something that subsumes individual instances of weather. He was a climate, and a climate that continues to affect other actors’ weather, altering the profession as no one had before and no one has since.

That “since” has lasted a long time. April 3 would have been Brando’s 100th birthday.

It’s not uncommon for people to call Brando the greatest actor who ever lived, certainly the greatest film actor. Others can, and do, argue for Laurence Olivier or Daniel Day-Lewis or even, as Steven Spielberg once did, Pete Postlethwaite. (Go ahead if you want to check his IMDb page.) But that’s a matter of opinion and preference. What’s beyond dispute is that Brando shook the superflux and in so doing redefined acting. Jack Nicholson, his Mulholland Drive next-door neighbor, put it best. “He gave us our freedom.”

Precisely because actors have for so long had that Brando-bestowed freedom, it’s hard to appreciate now the depth and extent of his impact. The Studio Era was ending, and the Brando Era, one we still live in, was arriving. There was the explosion of successes — a string of earthquakes (seismology as well as meteorology) — starting with the 1947 stage production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”; his movie debut, “The Men” (1950); the film version of “Streetcar” (1951); “Viva Zapata!” (1952); “Julius Caesar” (1953), the earthquake being Brando’s ability, as Mark Antony, to play Shakespeare, let alone so well that his costar John Gielgud, as Cassius, wanted to direct him in a stage “Hamlet”; “The Wild One” (1953), a negligible film, but with one of the defining moments in postwar American culture, when Brando’s motorcycle gang leader answers “Whaddya got?” to the question of what he was rebelling against; and “On the Waterfront” (1954), with Brando giving what Rob Reiner recently called “the greatest single performance in American cinema.”

Where Olivier and Gielgud enriched and extended a tradition, Brando created one. He was the anarchist as law-giver, making a new set of rules while seeming to ignore the old ones. Whether consciously or not, actors since have had to embrace those rules, reject them, or settle on some sort of compromise with them.

There had been Method actors before Brando, focused on creating characters from the inside out, but they had been relatively few and nowhere near as prominent. So, too, had there been rock ‘n’ roll musicians before Elvis. But like Elvis, Brando recast assumptions, expectations, possibilities — and upended limitations. It’s not just that he was the first star to find eloquence in the inchoate, to turn acting into a raid on the inarticulate. It was that doing so did so much to make him a star.

It was much more than just that, of course. Brando offered physicality, sexuality, internality, daring; and offered is the word, for there was an precedented directness of feeling in his performances. Drawing equally on emotion, intellect, and gesture, he embodied a stylization of behavior that seemed like the epitome of anti-style: the artifice of naturalism. There had never been anyone like him on stage or screen: that curled-up voice, the sensuous mouth, deep-set eyes, prominent cheekbones, linebacker physique. They were not the features of a matinee idol. They were the features of a louche, wary god. What other actor has ever been so good at going to extremes — such vulnerability and force, nakedness and opacity, tenderness and brutality — while making those extremes, and their contradictoriness, seem so plausible, even inevitable?

It’s easy enough to name actors whose work shows Brando’s influence. James Dean could have been his kid brother. According to Elia Kazan, who directed Brando in both versions of “Streetcar,” “Zapata!,” and “Waterfront” and Dean in “East of Eden,” he “dropped his voice to a cathedral hush when he talked about Marlon.” Joaquin Phoenix could be his grandson.

Some, like Paul Newman, bridled at any comparison, but the connection is unmistakable. Others, like Nicholson, his costar in “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), and Johnny Depp, his costar in “Don Juan DeMarco” (1994), wore it as a badge of honor. It was the chance to act with Brando that got each to agree to be in those projects. Much of the cast of “The Godfather” (1972) — Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, John Cazale — were his artistic sons as well as his onscreen offspring. In “Part II” (1974), with Robert De Niro, playing a younger version of Brando’s character from the first film, it was like a passing of the torch.

In 2001, when Brando conducted a series of informal acting seminars in Los Angeles, attendees included Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Robin Williams, Jon Voight, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Brando called the seminars “Lying for a Living.” As noted, it’s a matter of opinion whether Brando is the greatest actor. There’s no debate over whether he’s the most scornful. But that’s part of the climate he made, too. “Even when he mocks himself,” Pauline Kael wrote as early as 1966, “the self he mocks is more prodigious than anybody else around.”

Part of the ghastliness of Elvis’s final, Fat Elvis phase was how clearly miserable he was. Part of the fascination of Brando’s Fat Elvis phase was his gleefulness — and how glints of unpredictability, even genius, could peek through.

Affecting a brogue and wearing a Mother Hubbard, he’s the most interesting thing in “Missouri Breaks.” Smirking and wearing a white wig as the Man of Steel’s father, he looks paternally dubious in “Superman” (1978). He recites T.S. Eliot for no good reason in “Apocalypse Now” (1979). He offers George C. Scott a Milk Dud in “The Formula” (1980). There he is in “The Freshman” (1990), ice skating, looking “dainty as Dumbo,” as the film historian David Thomson has written. He plays a Chopin duet with one of the creatures in “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1996). In Michael Jackson’s 2001 music video “You Rock My World” (2001) he briefly whistles.

Regardless of how bad Brando’s movies were in the ‘60s — check out his mustache in “The Ugly American” (1963) — or how inexplicable his behavior from the mid-‘70s on, the aura never quite deserted him. “When you’ve been in form,” Kazan wrote to him in 1968, “you’ve been our best actor.” Part of Brando’s uniqueness was that even when not in form he remained transfixing.

There were three totemic figures of ‘50s cool: Brando, Frank Sinatra, and Miles Davis (Elvis was ‘50s hot, not ‘50s cool). The sad spectacle of the last two in their final years makes Brando’s own wild acceptance of decline look like the shrewdest of career moves. He didn’t try to act someone else’s age. Screw that (screw you, too). His embarrassments were willed.

In embracing awfulness, Brando both maintained his uniqueness and kept faith with his art. The former was clearly the case. The latter statement seems ridiculous, as ridiculous as the depths he could descend to. But consider: Brando was the great eruption of naturalism on the screen — and what’s more natural than letting yourself go, putting on the pounds (lots of them), growing bald, getting weird?

The grotesqueries of Brando’s late phase make perfect sense. They were an utter flouting of the star system that only he, the pluperfect Hollywood rebel, could have dared indulge in. He bragged that the less work he did the more he got paid. Proudly radical in his politics, Brando had the satisfaction of using his talent to subvert market economics. The biggest stars make their own rules, and in terms of stardom (if not of life itself) nothing is more grotesque than the aging process. But even at his most grotesque, he was never less than arresting.

Decades before all that, when “Streetcar” opened on Broadway, Tennessee Williams sent Brando a congratulatory telegram. That’s how long ago it was: Famous playwrights sent telegrams to their actors. “Ride out boy and send it solid,” Williams wrote. “You have something that makes the theatre a world of great possibilities.” Brando was all of 23 — 23! Ride out he did, and the great possibilities he made actual went so far beyond what even an imagination as lavish as Williams’s could have envisioned. In death, 77 years later, his example remains more urgent than that of any other actor: as challenge, as cautionary tale, as, yes, climate.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.