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50 free Marlon Brando trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Marlon Brando trivia quiz starts in Omaha with a salesman's son expelled from military school, follows him to Stella Adler's class where he laid an egg while everyone else ran from the bomb, and on to Broadway, Tallulah Bankhead's poison-pen recommendation and Stanley Kowalski. Then the films: the month in a veterans' hospital for The Men, the cue cards, the Triumph Thunderbird in The Wild One, the gun pushed away in On the Waterfront and the stolen Oscar, the mumbled Mark Antony, Guys and Dolls, One-Eyed Jacks after Kubrick was fired, the Bounty mutiny, the 'Fuck You Years', and then the make-up test with cotton balls that won him Vito Corleone. The last stretch covers the refused Oscar and Sacheen Littlefeather, Last Tango and the 15-year silence with Bertolucci, the $3.7 million for two weeks as Jor-El, Kurtz's whisper, the Razzie for Dr. Moreau, eleven children, the atoll of Tetiaroa, Wally Cox's ashes, Michael Jackson's Neverland and the single line recorded for a video game while on oxygen. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our The Godfather and Al Pacino quizzes next.
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Q 01In which city was Marlon Brando born in 1924?
Omaha, Nebraska
His father was a travelling salesman and his mother a stage actress; his ancestry was German, Dutch, English and Irish, with no Italian at all.
Q 02From which military academy was Brando effectively expelled in 1943 for insubordination?
Shattuck
His father had attended it too; a football injury there left him with a trick knee that kept him out of the Army.
Q 03When Stella Adler told her class to act like chickens with a nuclear bomb falling, what did Brando do?
Sat calmly and pretended to lay an egg
'I'm a chicken—what do I know about bombs?' he explained; he insisted Adler and Kazan, not Lee Strasberg, taught him.
Q 04Which childhood friend from Evanston, Illinois stayed close to Brando until his 1973 death and later shared his ashes?
Wally Cox
'If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him,' Brando said; their ashes were scattered in Tahiti and Death Valley.
Q 05Brando made his Broadway debut in 1944 in which play?
I Remember Mama
He played the son of Mady Christians; Truckline Cafe later got him voted Most Promising Young Actor.
Q 06Which star fired Brando from her play, then recommended him for Stanley Kowalski as 'a total pig of a man'?
Tallulah Bankhead
He had scratched, picked his nose and mumbled his way through her tour; she still called him 'a great young actor when he wanted to be'.
Q 07On which boxer did Brando base his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski?
Rocky Graziano
Graziano attended on tickets Brando gave him: 'on the stage is that son of a bitch from the gym, and he's playing me.'
Q 08How did Brando prepare to play a paraplegic veteran in his first film, The Men (1950)?
He spent a month in bed in an army hospital
Bosley Crowther wrote that he could 'lash into a passionate rage with the tearful and flailing frenzy of a taut cable suddenly cut'.
Q 09On the induction questionnaire, Brando described his race as 'human' and his colour as what?
'Seasonal-oyster white to beige'
He told an Army doctor he was psychoneurotic and avoided service in the Korean War.
Q 10Asked on The Godfather set why he wanted his lines printed out on cards, what did Brando reply?
'Because I can read them that way'
He claimed cue cards made him seem to search for words like a real person; others thought it was laziness.
Q 11Which Mexican revolutionary did Brando play in a 1952 Kazan film, earning his second Oscar nod?
Emiliano Zapata
Kazan secretly told co-star Anthony Quinn that Brando was unimpressed with him, to create tension; the two only compared notes years later.
Q 12Which Shakespearean role did Brando play opposite John Gielgud in 1953?
Mark Antony
John Huston said watching it was 'like a furnace door opening'; Gielgud offered him a season at Hammersmith, which he declined.
Q 13What was the make of motorcycle Brando rode in The Wild One (1953)?
His own Triumph Thunderbird
Q 21How much did a 1962 Saturday Evening Post story say Brando's Tahiti-shoot behaviour had sent 'down the drain'?
Six million dollars
Director Lewis Milestone said executives 'deserve what they get when they give a ham actor, a petulant child, complete control'.
Q 22How did Brando describe his middle-aged 1960s career slump in his memoir?
'The Fuck You Years'
He made The Night of the Following Day 'only for the money' and Candy, widely seen as his nadir, because a friend asked.
Q 23Which 1969 film, loosely based on Guadeloupe's history, did Brando call his own favourite?
Burn!
Sales of leather jackets and motorcycles soared afterwards; 'Nobody tells me what to do' was, he said, exactly how he felt all his life.
Q 14Which singer nearly got Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront before Spiegel wooed Brando back?
Frank Sinatra
Brando was still angry at Kazan for naming names to HUAC; Kazan admitted 'I always preferred Brando to anybody'.
Q 15In the 'I coulda been a contender' scene, what did Brando insist his character do with the gun?
Gently push it away
Kazan asked 'what other actor... would put his hand on the gun and push it away with the gentleness of a caress?'
Q 16What happened to Brando's Oscar statuette for On the Waterfront?
It was stolen and later turned up at a London auction house
He had walked out of the first screening convinced 'I was a huge failure'.
Q 17How did Brando describe his singing voice in Guys and Dolls (1955), his only musical?
'I couldn't hit a note with a baseball bat'
His songs were stitched together from countless takes; he and co-star Sinatra were frosty.
Q 18In The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Brando played Sakini, an interpreter of what nationality?
Japanese
Pauline Kael said he 'starved himself to play the pixie interpreter' and talked 'with a mad accent'.
Q 19For The Young Lions (1958), Brando dyed his hair blond to play a soldier of which nationality?
German
He argued the character should not be a Nazi caricature, prompting a televised row with novelist Irwin Shaw.
Q 20Which director was fired early from One-Eyed Jacks (1961), leaving Brando to make his directorial debut?
Stanley Kubrick
Shooting stretched from three months to six, costs doubled past $6 million and Paramount took the film away from him.
He said director Gillo Pontecorvo was the best he had worked with after Kazan and Bertolucci, and that 'we nearly killed each other'.
Q 24What did Brando use in his videotaped Godfather 'make-up test' to simulate the Don's puffed cheeks?
Cotton balls
Paramount's president had sworn Brando would never be in the picture; Gulf+Western's boss saw the test and asked 'What are we watching?'
Q 25Which two actors did Coppola narrow his Don Corleone shortlist to as 'the greatest actors in the world'?
Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando
Olivier then competed with Brando for the Best Actor Oscar with Sleuth, and beat him at the New York Film Critics Circle.
Q 26Brando became the second actor to refuse a Best Actor Oscar. Who was the first?
George C. Scott
Scott declined for Patton; Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his in 1973.
Q 27Sacheen Littlefeather's refusal of Brando's Oscar took place while which standoff was ongoing?
Wounded Knee
She cited 'the poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry'; Brando had been arrested at a Puget Sound 'fish-in' in 1964.
Q 28For how many years did Brando refuse to speak to Bernardo Bertolucci after Last Tango in Paris?
15
Bertolucci finally called in about 1993 and Brando said 'Come here... Now', as if nothing had happened.
Q 29How much was Brando paid for about two weeks' work as Jor-El in Superman (1978)?
$3.7 million
He also demanded not to read the script and to have his lines displayed off-camera; he later blocked his Superman II footage over money.
Q 30How much per week was Brando paid for his three weeks of work on Apocalypse Now?
$1 million
With his gross points he earned around $9 million; the whispered 'The horror! The horror!' became the film's most famous moment.