A new biography on Marlon Brando shows the award-winning actor as you've never seen him before

Marlon Brando was born in 1924 in Omaha. His father, also Marlon, was a pesticide salesman and his mother Dorothy, was an actress. Brando, aged 15, intervened one night as his father was drunkenly beating his mother, threatening to kill him if he touched her again, according to a new biography by William J. Mann.

Here is Brando with his father, Marlon Brando, Sr. and mother Dorothy in around 1950.

Two years later, his father sent him to Shattuck Military Academy to toughen him up. Instead the head of English and drama, Earle Wagner, spotted and encouraged his acting potential. Wagner, then 44, became the young Brando's friend and mentor. Five years later Wagner was fired for having sexual relations with some of the cadets — according to the new biography, Brando may have been affected as well. Pictured here at age six with his sister, Brando sits atop a Shetland pony.

Brando is remembered as one of the screen greats — arguably the greatest film actor — whose self-destructive urges squandered the talent he showed in films such as On The Waterfront, The Wild One (pictured) and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Brando once said 'the only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money'. He was the first actor to break the $1 million a movie barrier and earned $3.7 million for a three-minute appearance in Superman in 1978. Pictured here, British actress Vivien Leigh (Vivian Mary Hartley) smokes with Brando on the set of the film A Streetcar Named Desire.

He was 26 when he became a film star with an Oscar-winning performance in his first movie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and despite his proclivities he found the instant sex symbol status overwhelming. 'He would walk through Grand Central Station and women would open their shirts,' said a girlfriend, Ellen Adler. 'He was completely unprepared for that.' Here, Brando is all smiles as he holds his Oscar which was awarded to him for the best actor of 1954.

Perhaps one of the most handsome men of the 20th century, Marlon Brando had his pick of women (and men) at the height of his career. A compulsive womanizer and renowned lover, Brando had affairs with actresses Marilyn Monroe, Ursula Andress and Rita Moreno, and had relations with hundreds of other women.

The more women threw themselves at him, the more he treated them like dirt. Mann believes he insisted on their unstinting devotion because he never got that from his mother. It wasn't that Brando couldn't love, he loved many women but 'just couldn't show it very well', claims American singer and comedienne Kaye Ballard, another Brando flame. Here is a still from the set of Waterfront with Brando and American actress Eva Marie Saint.

Stardom brought him into the orbit of gorgeous female stars. He met stunning Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno, pictured here while filming The Night of the Following Day, in 1954 while they were making Napoleonic drama Desiree. Having first been struck by the woman's perfume he wore, she found him 'swaggeringly irresistible'. They started an eight-year affair which even survived his engagement to a pretty French 19-year-old, Josanne Mariani.   

In 1955, Brando reportedly started a fling with Marilyn Monroe when she was briefly single. 'Blonde and fragile', says Mann, Monroe wasn't Brando's type although she 'had an earthy sense of humour that he would have liked'. Brando claimed he and Monroe kept up their relationship intermittently for years, and she rang him days before her death. But Mann believes Brando only saw Marilyn 'once or twice'. 

Scared of being overshadowed, Brando generally preferred to go after less famous women, just as he preferred not to act alongside big name female stars. His three marriages were all to minor actresses — including one he'd found doing the washing up in a Polynesian hotel, and were all short-lived thanks to his philandering. As Brando was dressing for his wedding to his British-born first wife, his secretary Anna Kashfi (pictured here) spotted another woman in his bed. 

On location his behavior would deteriorate further. Filming 1962 film Mutiny On The Bounty in Tahiti, Brando had a different girl each day of the week. He also took a 'perverse pleasure in playing the home-wrecker', relishing the challenge of seducing friends' wives, sometimes jumping over garden fences to arrive unnoticed. He once sadistically invited over the husband of a mistress while she was with him. '[Brando] was lonely, and envious of those who weren't,' observes Mann. 

Despite sporadic career comebacks, such as his memorable performances in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, his later years were mired in a chaotic private life that produced at least 11 children and a string of B-list money-grubbing films. 'I had a lot of affairs. Far too many to describe me as a perfectly normal, reasonable, intelligent person,' Brando once said. Pictured here, the American actor poses while on the set of Desiree, directed by Henry Koster.