It's funny to me that Tony Soprano always watches the history channel and Biography. That's all I ever watch either. I never cared for episodic television. Presumably Tony Sporano is an extension of the show's creator, as are all the rest of the characters. In episode III of season IV, Tony goes off on a vent about "special interest" and asks what happened to the guys like Gary Cooper. Cooper he describes as "the strong silent type" who didn't complain about being "poor, Irish from Texas - whatever the fuck".

I watched the Biography edition of Jimmy Stewart, and he struck me as having lived his life the same way. He worked in the studios, he married one woman and stayed with her until she passed away. When WWII broke out he enlisted in the Air corps and flew B-17s over Europe. When the war ended and he was discharged , he returned to his "job" as an actor and never mentioned his service. When he was honored by the academy back in the late '70s, he appeared on stage looking great, silver-haired, with the same likable smile he always had. Unimpressed by his own life.

A week later Biography profiled Marlon Brando: "The rebel, misfit actor". It came across that he was always the center of attention, with his mysterious method and use of props to prepare himself. Then, as his career progressed, he got sidetracked by all these things that were removed from his own life: He became involved in the Tahitian independence movement , and American Indian struggles. He was frequently getting arrested, and God knows where his kids were or who was steering them into the adult world. He was taking all kinds of self-prescribed shit, and juicing and turning into a whale... Then, by the '80s his world was collapsing: his son killed somebody, and Brando himself was sitting in the docket, sobbing and pleading for the court to have mercy on him. I guess his half-Tahitian daughter killed herself, and there was some speculation about sexual abuse in the Brando house. The whole thing was a smoking, flaming wreck. Very tragic.

Obviously there's more separating Jimmy Stewart and Marlon Brando than a generation gap, but I couldn't help seeing the simlarity between Brando's life's arc, and A LOT of people I grew up around.