Seeing between the lines

On the occasion of my latest blog on Guardian Unlimited today, here’s a picture of Marlon Brando.

To prepare Marlon Brando for his role as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola sent the increasingly reclusive, and corpulent, actor a copy of Heart of Darkness, the novella by Joseph Conrad which inspired the film. One-million-dollar-per-day Brando’s arrival a few months later on that famously frazzled movie set in the Phillippines was greeted with some dismay.

How could he have studied Conrad’s brooding descriptions of the colonel’s Congo-based namesake and turn up for filming five stone fatter, knowing that the mad colonialist of the book is wasting away from a non-specified tropical disease? More here…