Marlon Brando would have despised the obituaries that poured into print upon his death last week. He hated looking back almost as much as he hated looking forward. Mr. Brando's life had been among the greatest of American parables and cautionary tales.

Unlike Elvis Presley and James Dean, who couldn't devise a strategy for living that could accommodate their unbearable fame, Marlon Brando died at age 80, shocking the critics by living longer than the usual expiration date for icons who came of age in the 1950s and '60s.

Mr. Brando rose to thespian pre-eminence as brutal Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire." He became a cinematic legend as Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." Like a black hole, however, Mr. Brando's glamour collapsed upon itself when he took the role of hulking Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," the darkest and most pivotal performance by an American actor in a generation.

His cinematic progeny reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood genius and excess: Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp. Scores of actors of both sexes delved liberally into Brando's repertoire of shifting personas for inspiration.

At the beginning of his career, Mr. Brando's dark beauty and brilliant acting awed audiences and his colleagues. Later, his reclusive life became a warning to his imitators that genius had its price. In time his life became a staple of lurid tabloid headlines.

In 1990, the actor's son Christian was arrested for killing his sister Cheyenne's abusive lover. Five years later, Mr. Brando's daughter committed suicide. Physically bloated and in chronic pain, Mr. Brando rarely emerged from the seclusion of his private island. When he did, it was to take part in bizarre public spectacles like a televised Michael Jackson special.

Despite lighter roles in a handful of forgettable movies noted more for their easy paychecks than cinematic ambitions, the specter of Col. Kurtz stuck to Mr. Brando like a burdensome shadow. His legend was always bigger than the dramas he'd been hired to occupy, making him a distracting element even in films in which he played a small role.

Such was the cost of being Marlon Brando. A new generation has come of age scarcely knowing or caring about his contribution to acting in the middle decades of the 20th century. For those who enjoyed him as the conflicted Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront" or the brooding Mafia patriarch in "The Godfather," Marlon Brando at his best made us an offer we couldn't refuse.