The birth of the ‘cool:’ Marlon Brando and the afro-aesthetics of psychological-realist acting

ABSTRACT Most histories of psychological-realist acting identify the mid-twentieth-century style with Lee Strasberg’s eponymous ‘Method,’ tracing its genealogy back to the work of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky and his Moscow Art Theatre protégés. The style’s most iconic practitioner—Marlon Brando—was more circumspect, however, rarely crediting Strasberg for his acting credentials. Taking Brando as a case study, I demonstrate other influences also at work. Tracing his ‘cool’ style of performance to the expanded movement vocabulary of choreographer Katherine Dunham and the intersubjective audience engagement of jazz saxophonist Lester Young, I demonstrate how Brando’s method of psychological-realist acting is rooted in Afro-Aesthetics and was practiced as an anti-racist form of self-imaging.