Awkward and overweight at school, he was sent by his father to a military academy "to toughen up" but was expelled for setting fire to the dorm. Rather that return home he joined his sister in New York as a pupil of Stella Adler at what became the Actor's Studio, where he was initiated into the Stanislavski philosophy of method acting, or "truthful acting that comes from inner experience". Adler claimed she taught him nothing: "I just opened up possibilities of thinking, feeling, expressing, and as I opened those doors he walked through."

A major retrospective of his movies runs in the IFI throughout August . . . giving seasoned fans and the uninitiated a chance to enjoy on the big screen what was unique about Brando. With his tight sweaty Tshirt and bulging biceps, the sheer physicality of his acting, his ability to communicate not just in words but through his body, made him one of the great screen icons and perhaps themost influential actor of the 20th century.

Hollywood, which he dismissed as "a cultural junkyard", sought to make him its own after his sensational debut as the paraplegic war veteran in The Men in 1950 and . . . in a reprise of his stage performance . . . his role as the inarticulate bully Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. He became the genius everyone loved to hate with a succession of masculine performances that made The Method a cliche: Mark Antony in Julius Caeser, and a biker in The Wild One, before winning his first Oscar as Terry Molloy in On The Waterfront.

While filming the $26 million epic Mutiny On The Bounty, which came in a year late, heavily over-budget and on which he had creative control, Brando ran off with a 17-year-old local extra Tarita to an atoll he purchased for $17,000. By now considered a liability, he had to go through the humiliation of doing a screen test at his own expense to get the part of Don Corleone in The Godfather in 1972. Several of the movie's more memorable moments were his ideas, particularly the death scene where Don Corleone puts orange peel in his mouth as fangs to frighten his grandson.

Bernardo Bertolucci persuaded him to play the risque role of a grieving middle-aged American expatriate indulging his sado-maoschistic fantasies with Maria Schneider in Last Tango In Paris by taking him to a Francis Bacon exhibition in which one of the distorted faces bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

Notorious for his use of cue cards, Brando reputedly scribbled his lines on Ms Schneider's bottom in some of their more explicit love scenes. "Brando is an angel as a man, a monster as an actor, " said Bertolucci.

"There's a deep doubt haunting him. He's always asking himself, is it really worth it?" Of all his movies, Last Tango in Paris, hailed by Pauline Kael as "the most powerful erotic movie ever made" . . . and which I had to see in France because, of course, it was banned in Ireland . . . now seems the most dated. He'll be better remembered for four other characters . . . Stanley Kowalski, Terry Molloy, Don Corleone and Kurtz.

Francis Ford Coppola managed to lure him away from his Tahitian island to play the renegade officer Kurtz hiding out in the Vietnam jungles in Apocalypse Now in 1979 . . . and had to pay him an extra $75,000 to stay on for an hour for a close-up saying the famous line "the horror, the horror" . . . while he accepted $2.5 million for a two-minute cameo in Superman. But his admirers had to settle for just a few more performances . . . Don Juan De Marco with Johnny Depp, The Freshman and his last movie The Score, with fellow Method actor Robert De Niro . . . before his death aged 80 on 2 July, 2004. Brando always put his political activism and his personal life before acting. "My soul is a private place, " he said. "In your heart of hearts you know movie stars aren't artists. I'm not knocking it, but I resent people putting it up. The only thing an actor owes his public is not to bore them." Whatever about his faults, he could never be accused of that.

Screening in the IFI are: On the Waterfornt (7 Aug), Brando: A Documentary (11 Aug), The Men (11 Aug), A Streetcar Named Desire (12 Aug), The Wild One (12 Aug), Julius Caeser (13 Aug), One-Eyed Jacks (15 Aug), The Last Tango In Paris (17-23 Aug), Queimada! (18 Aug), The Missouri Breaks (19 Aug), The Godfather (25 Aug), Apocalypse Now (26 Aug). Ciaran Carty