Quote of the Day (Stritch, on Brando)

“Marlon’s going to class to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.”—Actress Elaine Stritch on Marlon Brando, her fellow-student of acting teacher Stella Adler

(The always quotable Ms. Stritch is cited in Claudia Roth Pierpont’s article “Method Man,” appearing in this week’s New Yorker. The magazine, bless its chintzy little heart, has not posted the full text online, in keeping with its policy of only putting some pieces from each issue up. You can see an abstract here, then, if you want, either shell out the dough at the newsstand or—if you’re looking to economize in these troubled times—look it up at fine libraries everywhere—a prospect that, as what is called an “information specialist”, I certainly have no objection to.

In any case, Pierpont hasn’t produced a radical reconsideration of the man who, it’s commonly agreed, transformed American acting, but she does include—besides the lovely quote from Ms. Stritch—some details about the actor’s life that I, for one, did not know. Did you realize, for instance, that John Garfield was originally considered for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, until his demands led director Elia Kazan to look elsewhere?)