DANIEL DEFOE AND JONATHAN SWIFT wrote for pioneering early newspapers, Christopher Wren built Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and Alexander Pope started publishing poetry—all during the short reign of Queen Anne. But, says Professor of English James A. Winn, “Anne gets zero credit for it.”

“You read the standard biographies of Anne and they’re about parliamentary elections,” he explains of the early 18th-century British monarch’s legacy. “They’re about a big war fought and won in Europe.” Instead, Winn’s Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford University Press, 2014) takes a new approach, focusing on her deep appreciation of music, literature, theater, painting, and architecture. Anne supported production, and, Winn argues, encouraged quality and complexity.

But for Winn, that’s secondary to a bigger argument: art is invaluable historical evidence. From the political symbolism in works dedicated to the queen, to the personal letters she laced with literary allusions, Winn delves into what historians have passed over, making new discoveries about the monarch whose reign ended 300 years ago.

With Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Norton, 2014), Professor of English Susan L. Mizruchi shows the deeper, more cultured side of a very different figure. In 2010, a mutual acquaintance put Mizruchi—a Marlon Brando fan since age 12—in touch with Ellen Adler, the actor’s lifelong friend. In 12 hours of interviews, an unfamiliar Brando emerged: the voracious reader who collected a 4,000-book library (the largest section devoted to books on Native Americans, the second-largest on Jewish history and culture), the activist who held nuanced and ever-developing political views, and the actor who edited scripts and screenplays.

Intrigued, Mizruchi tracked down books and annotated scripts that auctions had scattered as far away as Switzerland and Moscow, and gained access to the personal letters and audio recordings in Brando’s remaining estate. The collectors, friends, and others allowing her a privileged look into the actor’s life “thought that an English professor was not going to write a typical, salacious Brando biography,” she says. And Brando’s Smile is anything but: armed with materials that no previous biographer has seen, Mizruchi reveals the thinker behind the actor.

arts&sciences spoke with Mizruchi about Brando, the materials she had access to that previous biographers did not, and what she discovered about the actor that surprised her.

There have been so many biographies written about Brando. Why did you feel another one was warranted?

Mizruchi: My book is based on a vast range of new materials that became available after Brando’s death in 2004, materials that yield an entirely new side of the human being and actor. No previous biographer has seen what I’ve seen: Brando’s personal film scripts and notes on films and his 4,000-book library.

What does your book set out to do?

To get as close to the truth about the man as possible by doing primary research and documenting every claim I make. I used my skills as a cultural historian to reveal the person behind the myth. Brando was very private, even secretive. He tended to compartmentalize his life and liked to control access to himself on the part of friends, family, and lovers. He kept people in the dark about each other and about different parts of himself. He was also of course an actor, with a great sense of humor, and he enjoyed disguising who he was and pulling peoples’ legs. The book also shows why his acting has been so widely admired, so influential: because there was real deliberateness and thought behind the performances.

Brando refused to be the icon that Broadway and Hollywood wanted to market once he was discovered at age 23—the inarticulate thuggish Stanley Kowalski. He insisted on being a studied character actor. I show that this is why the iconic image of Brando is so unstable—when you think of Brando the icon, you could think of the brutish Stanley K., the biker of The Wild One, the Godfather, the rogue Vietnam officer from Apocalypse Now. My book is about the deliberateness he brought to every role. Brando worked hard on his acting, building the characters he played, investing each one with specific characteristics—walks, voices, accents, gestures–rewriting their scripted lines (the only two authors he believed beyond his own revising capacities were Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams), creating their costumes, doing his own makeup (a rare skill for an American actor, but commonplace for Brando’s Yiddish Theatre forebears).

You argue that Brando was the victim of sexism. How so?

My point is that we have missed Brando’s mind and imagination because we have been so obsessed with his body—that’s a form of sexism. Brando has been consistently viewed as an actor and public figure who emblemized male beauty (and machismo) in his youth, and then became fat and self-indulgent as he aged. There’s some truth to the trajectory, though it’s always exaggerated (like a lot of actors and prizefighters, Brando was as good at losing weight as he was at gaining it—for instance, he had to wear padding to play Don Corleone in The Godfather because he’d lost too much weight for the role—but he simply gave up the battle when he was older), but the focus on the body misses a whole dimension of the person. That Brando loved language and poetry, that he was a wordsmith from a young age and with his childhood friend, actor Wally Cox, would compose lists of his favorite words, that he was fascinated by psychology and religion and especially admired the work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose books he read cover to cover.

Brando was famous for conveying an ambivalence toward acting. But you found evidence to suggest otherwise. Can you talk about that?

One reason that Brando often sounded so hostile toward acting is that he was so anti-institutional. This is what made him a terrible student in school, especially military school, and it’s what made him dislike Broadway as much as Hollywood. He was drawn intuitively to the flaws, the hierarchies, and the injustices of institutional life. He also disliked the fact that Broadway and Hollywood were both driven by market considerations—something he later took advantage of in the most cynical way. But Brando’s views of acting were actually quite idealistic for a significant part of his career, but his idealism often came into conflict with institutional aspects of filmmaking. From his first Hollywood role, playing a paraplegic war veteran in Stanley Kramer’s social problem film The Men, to a much later example, the 1994 antiapartheid film A Dry White Season, Brando demonstrated his conviction that films could enlighten and elucidate social issues without sacrificing quality or entertainment value.

You write about his sense of humor and yet that was never conveyed in his on-screen work. Why not?

Brando loved humor and owned many books about the humor of different cultures. His playfulness and sense of humor were something that everyone I interviewed emphasized. He enjoyed cutting up, and he had a great time, for example, making the comedy Bedtime Story with David Niven. The two actors had such a wonderful time putting each other on that the filming often had to stop in order to get the two stars to stop laughing. But the film is pretty bad, and it’s clear that Brando’s deepest sense of human experience was tragic. When he talked about humor, he was most impressed by the grimness and bitterness that underwrote so much comedic work. He also recognized that risk was inherent in humor and the best comedians had to be fearless—the greater the risks they took, the greater the comedic payoff.

You provide some fascinating examples of Brando rewriting scenes. What struck you about his ear for dialogue and his revisions?

The main principle that Brando adhered to was: less is more. He never used an utterance if a gesture, shake of the head or wave of the hand, would do. And he regularly wrote or improvised some of the best lines for his characters after crossing out paragraphs of dialogue he considered overdone. He understood how expressive silence could be and the value of conciseness.

He came up with many film lines that have become colloquial. From The Godfather: “Bonasera, Bonasera, what did I ever do to make you treat me so disrespectfully?” “We’re not murderers, despite what this undertaker says.” From Mutiny on the Bounty: “I was just thinking, sir, that our little errand for groceries might end up in a page of naval history if we succeed in negotiating the Horn in the dead of winter.” From One-Eyed Jacks: “Get up, you scum-sucking pig!” “Well, you know me, Dad, if I didn’t feel right about it, we’d be out there splattering each other all over that front yard…a man can’t stay angry for five years. Can he?”

After all of your research, what did you come to admire most about him?

His curiosity, as well as his skepticism. Judging from his book collection, he was someone who wanted to understand deeply whatever it was that interested him. One of the most typical comments in the margins of his books was, “get,” which was a reminder to get a book that was mentioned in what he was reading and that sounded interesting or important. In his direct encounters with people, too, he was someone who studied other human beings with the concentration of a zoologist. Brando’s hunger to know and understand the world and people in it was as great, I found, as his more legendary hungers for women and food. At the same time, he was a person who was always questioning, doubting. He argued with authors he deeply admired (signaled by his calling them up, or buying all their books—examples, Hannah Arendt, Lewis Thomas) in the margins of their books, writing, “how do you know?” or “was you dere Charlie?” He wanted to know all sides of an issue.