Marlon Brando   
Marlon Brando, the stage and screen actor whose performances in A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and The Godfather earned him plaudits as one of the greatest actors of all time, died July 1. He was 80.

The actor was as famous for his off-screen antics as his on-screen performances. He could be intensely private, and yet he earned reams of publicity for his eccentric behavior and sometimes outlandish salary demands.

On The Score (2001), he refused to be on the set at the same time as director Frank Oz; he received US$4 million for 10 minutes of acting in Superman (1978); he sent a woman who called herself Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his Oscar for The Godfather (1972).

But Brando was always held in esteem. He was born April 3, 1924, in Nebraska. Known as a rambunctious child, he was sent to military school as a teenager to curb his behavior. He was expelled.

Prevented from enlisting in World War II due to his 4-F status, he moved to New York at 19 to live with his sister Frances. Another sister, Jocelyn, was studying acting with legendary coach Stella Adler; Brando joined her. Adler was quickly impressed. "Within a year, Marlon Brando will be the best young actor in the American theater," she said, according to the AP.

Brando's first film, The Men (1950), earned rave reviews, but it wasn't until the 1951 film version of Streetcar that he became a major movie star. Three years later, Brando won his first Oscar for his performance as ex-boxer Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

His roles in Streetcar, Waterfront and The Wild One (1953) established him as an icon of the 1950s. Over the course of his career, he was nominated for eight Oscars, winning two - for Waterfront and The Godfather (1972).

Antonio Gades 

Recognized as the greatest Spanish male dancer of his generation and an even greater choreographer, Antonio Gades died of cancer in Madrid on July 20. He was 67.

Antonio Gades was the first director of Ballet Nacional de Espa. Between 1980 and 1986, he participated with the film director Carlos Saura in the musical films Bodas de sangre, Carmen and El amor brujo, a trilogy that is the best audiovisual testimony of his work.   

Arthur Hailey

Arthur Hailey, the best-selling author who plucked characters from ordinary life and threw them into extraordinary ordeals, died at his home in the Bahamas on November 24. He was 84.

The British-born writer's knack for turning the mundane into thrilling tales brought 11 books published in 40 countries and 38 languages, with 170 million copies in print.

His novels made into movies include Airport, Hotel, Wheels, The Moneychangers and Strong Medicine.

Christopher Reeve

Christopher Reeve, who portrayed a hero in the Superman films and embodied one as an advocate for spinal cord research after being paralyzed in an accident, died on October 10. He was 52. 

Reeve first gained renown when he was selected from 200 candidates to play the title character in the 1978 movie Superman, which was followed by three sequels. But he made a bigger impact on the public consciousness after becoming paralyzed in May 1995, following an equestrian accident in Virginia.

Reeve was born September 25, 1952, in New York City, the son of a novelist and a newspaper reporter. He appeared on the soap opera Love of Life while attending college at Cornell University; In his senior year, he was also one of two students selected to attend New York's prestigious Juilliard School to study under John Houseman (the other was Robin Williams).

He debuted on Broadway in 1976 in the play A Matter of Gravity, opposite Katharine Hepburn, and later starred Fifth of July, playing a gay, crippled Vietnam veteran.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Frenchman whose early dabblings with a Brownie box camera blossomed into celebrated lifetime of traveling the world to capture the human drama on film, died August 3 at age 95.

     
From Mahatma Gandhi's funeral to portraits of William Faulkner, Cartier-Bresson was a pioneer in photojournalism whose pictures defined the mid-20th century and inspired generations of photographers. Yet he was famously averse to having his own picture taken and in later years turned away from photography to the love of his youth, painting.

Most of his international fame was generated from publication in leading magazines like Life, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and prestigious exhibitions, notably a 1947 one-man exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Cartier-Bresson was born August 22, 1908, in Paris to a wealthy textile family. He was interested mainly in painting. At 20, he turned his back on the lucrative family business to study art.

In 1930, with a box camera, he started dabbling in photography. Two years later, armed with his Leica, he traveled around Europe and West Africa, published photos in magazines and had his first exhibition in Madrid in 1933.

His most famous work is Rue Mouffetard, a poignant shot of a grinning youngster carrying two bottles of wine down a market street.

 
Editor: Catherine