But for all those successes, Brando had not yet made the cover of LIFE — a magazine that prided itself on capturing and reflecting the nations’ obsessions and interests, week after week after week. In 1952, that oversight was remedied, as legendary photographer Margaret Bourke-White shot a portrait session with Brando, capturing the 28-year-old star in a casual, playful mood.

For reasons lost to time, Bourke-White’s photos — discovered in LIFE’s archives and marked with the sole descriptive phrase, “cover tries” — were never published in the magazine. (Though Bourke-White’s portraits never saw the light of day, Brando ultimately did grace the cover of LIFE, making his first appearance in character as Antony from Julius Caesar in the April 20, 1953, issue. He’d appear on the cover three more times.)

It is difficult to look at the face of the young Brando without feeling the influence of his most iconic performances, from On the Waterfront to The Godfather. Here, meet the young Brando at his most charismatic and mysterious, seen through the lens of one of LIFE’s greatest photographers, in a series of photos that never ran in the magazine.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando, 1952

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marlon Brando: First LIFE Cover

Margaret Bourke-White Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Marlon Brando: Portraits of a Charismatic Young Star, 1952 appeared first on LIFE.

LIFE’s Paul Schutzer had trailed Christie, then just 25 years old, as she filmed her next high-profile film: Fahrenheit 451, directed by the French New Wave auteur François Truffaut. (For unknown reasons, the shot that editors selected for the April 29, 1966, cover was not by Schutzer, after all, but by Iranian photographer Hatami.)

Making the adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel was a huge undertaking for both the British actress and her French director: Christie was pulling double duty, cast in both the lead female roles, and Truffaut—who had built his name in 1959 with the seminal Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)—was taking a risk helming his first English-language film. (It would turn out to be his last.) Still, a sense of calm and respect ruled the set, according to notes filed by Paul Schutzer: “Truffaut seldom approaches her. He uses the formal ‘vous’ to Julie as he does with everyone. Everybody’s aware of his shyness and also aware of his potential warmth. It’s anticipation of this warmth that brings out the best in his team.”

As for Christie’s own work ethic and her attitude toward her craft: “I feel no difference between me acting and not acting,” she told LIFE. “There’s only one Christie. But I know I’m never more myself than when acting, because I put all of myself into it.”

“A mere three years ago,” LIFE wrote of Christie, “she was an unnoticed bit player, and she’s still pinned to a movie contract that calls for wages like those an old-time film goddess paid her second chauffeur. Julie represents a new spectrum of actresses the anti-goddesses but do not confuse her with just any jaunty gamine frugging on the dance floor of a discotheque. On screen, as the 2,700 movie pros who voted her the Oscar know, she burns with a nervous energy that lights up the house.”

At the time of the shoot, Christie was living with her boyfriend of about three years, an artist named Don Bessant. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever want anyone but Don, but marriage it’s like signing your life away,” she told LIFE. By 1967 the couple had split, and Christie was in a relationship with Warren Beatty, who would later remark that she was “the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person” he had ever known.

“For men, I don’t think it’s sexiness in me that appeals to them, but an air of abandonment,” Christie told LIFE. “Men don’t want responsibilities and neither do I.”

Despite her early misgivings about marriage, Christie did eventually marry—in 2008, she and her longtime partner, journalist Duncan Campbell, tied the knot.

“There’s still one important thing for me to do: learn,” Christie told LIFE in 1966. “I’ve got so little control over myself that adrenaline simply flows. I’m awkward, the type who always does things wrong.” But what may have felt wrong to her was all right in the eyes of her peers and critics: She was nominated for a BAFTA Award the British equivalent of an Oscar for her dual performance in Fahrenheit 451, and has been an Academy Award nominee twice in the decades since.

Not all of Paul Schutzer’s photos from 1966 moody gems showing the actress on and off the Fahrenheit 451 set made it to print. Now, LIFE.com brings to light these pictures of the film icon and thinking filmgoer’s sex symbol in her prime.

ulie Christie beside costar Oskar Werner in a scene from Farhenheit 451.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie took direction from Francois Truffaut on the Fahrenheit 451 set in London, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie in hair and makeup, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie with photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Paul Schutzer’s LIFE colleague.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I’m just in love with cinema,” Christie told LIFE. “In the theater no one in the house will forgive you if you break the spell. In cinema you can always go over something wrong—go deeper, dig further, stretch wider.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I love and adore acting, but I hate the trimmings,” she told LIFE—but Christie became a fashion icon anyway, here representing that swinging-’60s look out of London.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I’ve got something of a frustrated quiz kid in me,” Christie confessed to LIFE. “I never read enough. Novels simply don’t interest me. I like history because it’s based on facts.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie on set, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I arranged a fake lunch with the two of them,” LIFE photographer Schutzer wrote in his notes of creating this photo op between the very shy Truffaut (who spoke very little English) and his star Christie.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Though she called it the “greatest place for a holiday,” Christie told LIFE back in ’66 that she had no desire to work in Hollywood: “I feel very strongly European.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The post An ‘Air of Abandonment’: Photos of Julie Christie, 1966 appeared first on LIFE.

After all, it was a time when audiences could also opt for a newer kind of star (exemplified in Dustin Hoffman, who shared the magazine’s cover with the Western icon). But John Wayne was still making Westerns, still riding horses, still holding onto his vision of right and wrong.

“Writers have a tendency to make me rough and tough, as if I’m ready to punch someone any minute,” the 62-year-old star told LIFE. “I’m not. I haven’t had a fight in many a year. I do see myself as pretty rough, even cruel on occasion, but never mean, never small, never petty.”

In fact, he wouldn’t even take a part to play a character whom he saw as mean or dishonest. If he was going to kill a man on screen, it had to be for a good narrative reason. Though he rued having once said that he didn’t need to act to do his job (the statement was poorly phrased, he explained to the magazine) it was also clearly the case that the John Wayne audiences still loved to watch on screen was, in many ways, the same man LIFE’s cameras captured on set and with his family.

“The reason I hate age,” he said, “is that I love this work so much.”

John Wayne during filming of the western movie “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne said that while his screen portrayals are comfortingly alike, not all represent his true self.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne and his moviemaking trophies and awards.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne at home with his son Ethan.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The three youngest of Wayne’s seven children—John Ethan, 7; Marisa, 3; Aissa, 13—share the spotlight with Wayne and Pilar, his third wife.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Horses from “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne during filming of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Off camera Wayne went on horseback to survey the 20,000-acre cattle spread near Phoenix in which he was a partner. `I was broke in 1960,” he said to LIFE. “Now I manage my own money.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On the set of “The Undefeated” Wayne, surrounded by extras.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The backrub eased the pain of a shoulder separation suffered in a fall from a horse when his saddle slipped.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Wayne on the set of “The Undefeated.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Wayne slept in the custom-built trailer that followed him from location to location. “The only reason I hate age,’ he said, “is that I love this work so much.”

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Behind the Scenes With John Wayne, 1969 appeared first on LIFE.

Novelist James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, for instance, were based on the murderous machinations of Ruth Snyder, who killed her husband with the help of her lover. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and David Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter are among other works that were “ripped from the headlines.”

The tabloids also influenced the distinctive look of the films that were inspired by these fictions. In the 1930s, flashbulbs, new cameras, and faster shutter speeds allowed newspaper photographers to ply their trade pretty much anywhere, anytime. The result: a daily documentation of the previously unexplored underbelly of urban existence. Even the look of these photos added to their impact: “The lack of naturalness in these pictures was not a shortcoming but a source of their melodramatic power,” wrote John Szarkowsi in Photography Until Now. “It is as though terrible and exemplary secrets were revealed for an instant by lightning.”

Historian Luc Sante has even made a connection between specific photos and subsequent films. “A 1945 picture of a slaying at Tony’s Restaurant, with its violent angle, oblique window approach, and mocking use of advertisements, anticipates the blunt force of Anthony Mann’s T-Men . . . and the jazzy chill of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly,” he wrote, adding that a 1930 shot of a homicide at New York’s Chinatown People’s Theater reflects the look of Howard Hawks’s 1932 film Scarface.

No photographer was more identified with tabloid journalism than Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, who made his name freelancing out of Manhattan’s police headquarters. (“Here was the nerve center of the city I knew,” he wrote, “and here I would find the pictures I wanted.”) With relentlessness and relish, he covered auto accidents, deli holdups, gambling joints, and “jumpers,” turning a nation of readers into rubberneckers even as he imbued ghastly Gotham with a kind of poetry. “Crime was my oyster,” Weegee said, “and I liked it.”

Weegee’s first photography book, 1945’s autobiographical Naked City, inspired the 1948 noir film The Naked City. Reflecting the documentary style that gave many noirs their sense of authenticity, The Naked City was shot entirely in New York City and ended with the iconic line “There are eight million stories in the naked city this has been one of them.”

The success of the book and film led to a minor acting career for Weegee. In a self-reflexive Hollywood hall of mirrors, he appeared in a few of the films his work had helped shape: 1949’s classic boxing noir, The Set-Up, and 1951’s forgettable remake of Fritz Lang’s proto-noir M. Even as the photographer disdained L.A.’s natives as “zombies” (“they drink formaldehyde instead of coffee, and have no sex organs”), he was collecting material for his next book: Naked Hollywood, naturally.

Read more in LIFE’s new special edition Film Noir: 75 Years of the Greatest Crime Films, available on Amazon.

Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford, 1945.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Jack Carson (kneeling) and Zachary Scott in Mildred Pierce, 1945.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, 1967.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Touch Of Evil director Orson Welles, 1958.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Touch of Evil, 1958.

Courtesy Everett Collection

Alfred Hitchcock at work for the film Shadow of a Doubt, 1943.

William Vandivert The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, Body Heat, 1981.

©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Orson Welles (far left) in The Third Man, 1949.

Mary Evans/London Film Productions/British Lion Film Productions/Ronald Grant Everett Collection

Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, 1944.

Rights Managed—Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evan

Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, 1986.

De Laurentiis Entertainment Group Everett Collection

The post How Tabloids Inspired Film Noir appeared first on LIFE.

The most recent movie adaptation of the Mitty story, from 2013, starred Ben Stiller in the titular role as the archetypal nebbish who retreats into an intensely vivid fantasy world in times of stress. (The first film version of Mitty, starring Danny Kaye, was released in 1947.) In this rendition of the tale, Stiller plays a photo editor at LIFE magazine—still publishing, thanks to the magic of the movies—and much of the film is set in the meticulously recreated offices of the storied weekly. In those offices, meanwhile, hang poster-sized versions of LIFE magazine covers through the years.

The covers are stirring and iconic—and, for the most part, they’re fake.

Or rather, the majority of the LIFE covers one sees in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty were never covers at all. The pictures on the covers in this gallery, for example—the launch of Apollo 11; Jayne Mansfield luxuriating in a swimming pool; a theater audience watching the first-ever 3-D feature-length film—are, indisputably, classic LIFE images. But none of them ever graced the cover of LIFE magazine.

“When we were selecting photos for the LIFE covers in Walter Mitty,” said Jeff Mann, the production designer on the film, “we focused on pictures that would serve the story we were telling, but that would also capture the diversity of what LIFE covered in its prime. We worked really, really hard to select photos that were novel, naïve in the best possible way and that featured significant twentieth-century people, places and events.”

In the end, Mann said, he and his team and Stiller, who is a photography aficionado, felt that the photos they chose to use as covers, from the literally millions of pictures in LIFE’s archive, had to somehow “convey the influence of LIFE magazine, while at the same time helping to move our story along. It was a fabulous problem, and one we had a lot of fun working to solve.”

Here, then, are a number of LIFE covers that never were—including several that, in light of how wonderful they look—perhaps should have been covers, after all.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

LIFE magazine cover created for the movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

LIFE Logo and Images © Meredith Corporation.

The post ‘Walter Mitty’ and the LIFE Magazine Covers That Never Were appeared first on LIFE.

Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs made by Bill Ray in 1963 a time in the 25-year-old Wood’s career when she had made the leap from actress to genuine movie star and, more importantly, to formidable Hollywood player. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE, but appear in Ray’s book, My Life in Photography. 

For Ray, the most striking memory of the several weeks that he spent with Wood and her showbiz cohorts is, unsurprisingly, Wood herself or, more specifically, her singular beauty.

“She was divine,” Ray told LIFE.com. “Really. She was divine to look at, and to photograph. She had that wonderful face, a great body, those amazing eyes just a beautiful young woman, and a lot of fun to be around.”

For the Dec. 20, 1963, issue of LIFE that focused wholly on the movies, Ray scored the choice, high-profile feature on Wood, which was the only piece in the issue that was devoted to a single actor or actress. “This was big stuff,” he says today of the assignment. “You know, back then photographers were never part of the meetings where these sort of assignment decisions were made, so to get the call for something of this magnitude I was thrilled.”

Thrilled, but hardly cowed or overawed. After all, by the time the Natalie Wood shoot came his way, Ray was a seasoned professional, having covered JFK, Elvis Presley, John Wayne and other huge names and famous faces. What comes through in many of his photographs is the sense that here was a photographer who genuinely enjoyed his work, while his subject was a strong young woman who had been in the public eye for so long that having her every move documented was hardly anything new.

As LIFE reminded its readers in that special year-end double issue back in 1963, Natalie Wood was about as self-aware and self-confident an actress as one was likely to meet:

Natalie Wood was in a crowd watching a movie being filmed 21 years ago when the director asked her do a bit: drop an ice cream cone and cry. Then and there, 4-year-old Natalie showed she was born to be a star: she wept so convincingly that the movies hired her and ever since they have been thankful for the foresight. . . . [Movies] still cannot get along without the glamor that stars bring. And Natalie, the biggest young star around, now holds Hollywood in her hand. Her latest performance in her 35th film, ‘Love With a Proper Stranger,’ may win her an Oscar. [She did earn an Academy Award nomination for the role, but Patricia Neal took home the Oscar for her work in ‘Hud.’] Natalie has talent which she uses brilliantly, temperament which she can control, and a dark fresh loveliness that glows from the screen. All this earns her a million dollars a year, along with something that means even more to her the power and the glory that stardom brings.

“Natalie Wood,” observed a prominent Hollywood director, … “has a stranglehold on every young leading-lady part in town. If a role calls for a woman between 15 and 30, you automatically think of her.”

This is exactly what Natalie has worked 21 years to get. She has battled producers and top studio heads with unyielding ferocity to win the roles she wants. Today, before she will do a picture, she demands and gets total approval of script, director, leading man, all actors, everybody clear down to make-up and wardrobe people.

One last detail that Bill Ray recalls about his time with Natalie Wood, however, casts something of a pall across his otherwise sunny memories. At some point during those several weeks, he joined Wood and a number of other people on a boat ride to Catalina Island (see slide 16 in the gallery) the same island off the California coast near which Wood would drown in the fall of 1981. When Ray heard about her death, he was stunned: not only because he had always liked her and remembered the time he spent with her with such fondness, but because he had been struck during that boat ride in 1963 by how uncharacteristically out of sorts she seemed.

“It was obvious to me,” Ray told LIFE.com, “that Natalie did not like being out on the water at all. When I heard that she’d drowned, in basically the same place where we’d been all those years before, I wasn’t just sad although that was part of it. I was also very, very surprised.”

Five decades later, the mystery of Natalie Wood’s death endures. Bill Ray’s pictures, meanwhile, shed a clear, poignant light on a time when the star’s already impressive career felt boundless, and her life charmed. The future, it seemed then, was hers for the taking.

—story by Ben Cosgrove 

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood was playing a game. Friends named something, she acted it out. Here is ‘slightly sensuous.'”

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The woman who guided Natalie to stardom was her mother, the Russian-born Mrs. Maria Gurdin (center). Stern and shrewd, she scrutinized scripts, haggled over fees, snd dressed her child in prim clothes when competitors wore sexy ones.

© Bill Ray

Wood played billiards with actor Tony Curtis, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood got a piggyback ride from producer Arthur Loew, Jr., who stopped when Paul Newman invited them to go go-cart racing, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Gowned in satin, bathed by spots, fussed over by attendants, Wood glowed with the glamor pf a Hollywood star.

© Bill Ray

Wood, a shrewd businesswoman, enjoyed presiding over her high-powered cabinet.

© Bill Ray

Wood’s big brown-black eyes grew larger with delight seeing costumes sketched by Edith Head for `Sex and the Single Girl’.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The post Natalie Wood: Portraits of a Legend appeared first on LIFE.