Marlon Brando Trivia
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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.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Marlon Brando born in 1924?
Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha, Nebraska was only his first home: he grew up mostly in Illinois and dug ditches for a summer before his father agreed to pay for acting school in New York.
Q 02What happened to the teenage Brando at Shattuck Military Academy in 1943?
He was expelled
He was expelled for insubordination, as he had been from his previous high school; that summer he left for New York, where his sisters lived and acting classes finally held his attention.
Q 03What did Brando do when Stella Adler's class had to play chickens awaiting a bomb?
Calmly laid an egg
Calmly laid an egg was his answer while classmates ran about in a panic; asked why, he told Adler, 'I'm a chicken—what do I know about bombs?'
Q 04Which childhood friend stayed so close to Brando that their ashes were eventually scattered together?
Wally Cox
Wally Cox, TV's mild Mr. Peepers, had known him since their Evanston boyhood; after Cox died in 1973, Brando kept the ashes at home, sometimes in a drawer or under his car seat.
Q 05Which question to Brando's biker in The Wild One draws the famous reply 'Whaddaya got'?
'What are you rebelling against?'
'What are you rebelling against?' sets up the film's most quoted line; the shrugged 'Whaddaya got?' made Johnny a rebel with no cause at all, a gang leader who has no idea what he really wants.
Q 06Brando was fired from which star's touring production of The Eagle Has Two Heads in 1946?
Tallulah Bankhead
Tallulah Bankhead hired him despite a poor audition, then clashed with him all through the tryout tour; losing the job left him free for the stage role that made him famous a year later.
Q 07On which boxer did Brando base his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski?
Rocky Graziano
Rocky Graziano trained at a gym where the unknown actor quietly studied him; given tickets to the play, the middleweight champion found the fellow from the gym up on stage playing him.
Q 08How did Brando prepare to play a paralysed soldier in The Men (1950)?
Moved into a veterans' hospital ward
Moved into a veterans' hospital ward: pretending he could not walk, he lived among paralysed patients for weeks to learn first-hand how they moved and what they felt.
Q 09Which smooth-talking gambler did Brando play in the 1955 musical Guys and Dolls?
Sky Masterson
Sky Masterson bets he can take a strait-laced missionary to Havana; Brando, a dramatic actor new to musicals, sang every one of the high roller's numbers in his own voice.
Q 10On The Godfather set, how did Brando explain wanting his lines printed on cards?
'Because I can read them that way'
'Because I can read them that way' was his deadpan reply; challenged by Coppola, he argued the cards kept him spontaneous, since real people don't know what they are going to say next.
Q 11Which Mexican revolutionary did Brando play in a 1952 Kazan film, earning his second Oscar nod?
Emiliano Zapata
Emiliano Zapata was the title role of Viva Zapata!, played behind heavy makeup and an accent; Brando lost the Oscar, while Anthony Quinn, cast as his brother, won one.
Q 12Which Shakespearean role did Brando play opposite John Gielgud in 1953?
Mark Antony
Mark Antony looked like a joke to comedians, who mocked the casting in a Kowalski mumble; his 'Friends, Romans, countrymen' answered them and brought a third straight Oscar nomination.
Q 13Which motorcycle did Brando ride in The Wild One (1953)?
His own Triumph Thunderbird
Q 21Which actor played the deluded young patient of Brando's psychiatrist in Don Juan DeMarco?
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp plays a young man convinced he is the world's greatest lover; Brando's weary psychiatrist, meant to cure him, catches the romance instead and starts wooing his own wife again.
Q 22Which line does Brando's dying colonel whisper near the end of Apocalypse Now?
'The horror! The horror!'
'The horror! The horror!' comes straight from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the novella about a Congo ivory trader that Coppola carried across to the Vietnam War.
Q 23Which director of The Battle of Algiers made Burn!, the film Brando said held some of his best acting?
His own Triumph Thunderbird was the bike on screen; Triumph's American importers objected to seeing it under an outlaw gang leader, yet decades later the firm was selling replicas of his leather jacket.
Q 14Which singer nearly played Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront before producer Sam Spiegel won Brando back?
Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra, a Hoboken native, had a handshake deal and even a costume fitting for the film shot in his home town; Brando had hesitated because Kazan had named names to HUAC.
Q 15In the 'I coulda been a contender' scene, what does Brando's Terry do when his brother pulls a gun?
Gently push it away
Gently push it away, with what Kazan called 'the gentleness of a caress'; Brando thought so little of his own work that he walked out of the first screening sure he had failed.
Q 16What happened to the Oscar statuette Brando won for On the Waterfront?
It vanished, then surfaced at auction
It vanished, then surfaced at auction in London, he wrote in his memoir; decades later a Brando Oscar was in the news again when Leonardo DiCaprio, given one as a gift, handed it to US investigators.
Q 17How did Brando describe his Guys and Dolls singing?
'I couldn't hit a note with a baseball bat'
'I couldn't hit a note with a baseball bat' was his verdict; each song, he admitted, was stitched together from countless takes, though he still sang every number himself rather than be dubbed.
Q 18In The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), Brando played Sakini, an interpreter of what nationality?
Japanese
Japanese villager Sakini, on occupied Okinawa, runs rings round the American officers sent to modernise his village: they arrive to build a school and end up building a teahouse.
Q 19For The Young Lions (1958), Brando dyed his hair blond to play a soldier of which nationality?
German
German officer Christian Diestl is a hardened Nazi in Irwin Shaw's novel; the film makes him a decent man deceived by his rulers, a change Brando championed because he felt the book painted all Germans as evil caricatures.
Q 20Which director left One-Eyed Jacks (1961) before filming began, leaving Brando to direct for the only time?
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick spent six months on the script before the two fell out; Brando then shot so much extra footage that editing dragged on and the western, begun in 1958, reached cinemas only in 1961.
Gillo Pontecorvo
Gillo Pontecorvo cast him as a British agent who stirs up a sugar-island slave revolt and later returns to crush it; Brando ranked him among his finest directors even though, he wrote, 'we nearly killed each other.'
Q 24What did Brando use to darken his hair in his home-video screen test for The Godfather?
Shoe polish
Shoe polish in his hair and a rolled-back collar turned him into an ageing Don on tape; Paramount's executives, who had been against casting him, gave way once they watched it.
Q 25Which English stage legend did Coppola name with Brando as the only two actors he wanted for Don Corleone?
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier was too ill to take the part, his agent said, which left Brando; within a year the two were rivals anyway, both nominated for the same Best Actor Oscar.
Q 26Which actor, two years before Brando, became the first to refuse the Best Actor Oscar?
George C. Scott
George C. Scott declined it for Patton, calling the Oscars a 'meat parade' he wanted no part of; Brando's refusal was a protest instead, delivered by an activist he sent in his place.
Q 27Sacheen Littlefeather's refusal of Brando's Oscar took place while which standoff was ongoing?
Wounded Knee
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, had been seized by American Indian Movement activists a month earlier and was under siege; Littlefeather named it from the stage as part of his reason for refusing.
Q 28Which Last Tango in Paris director did Brando refuse to speak to for years after seeing the finished film?
Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci had coaxed him into improvising from his own painful memories; Brando felt exposed when he saw the result, and the silence ended only when the director phoned him years later.
Q 29Which character did Brando play for about two weeks' work and a $3.7 million fee in Superman (1978)?
Jor-El
Jor-El, the hero's Kryptonian father, is on screen for only minutes; Brando first proposed playing him as a suitcase or a green bagel with his voice, until the director talked him round.
Q 30Which renegade officer, worshipped by his jungle followers, did Brando play in Apocalypse Now?
Colonel Kurtz
Colonel Kurtz is a Green Beret gone rogue; Brando arrived overweight and unprepared, one of the troubles that stretched a planned five-month shoot in the Philippines to more than a year.