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org/wiki/Marlon_Brando

production delays his behavior cost; and he had to submit to a screen test. Coppola convinced
Brando to do a videotaped "make-up" test, in which Brando did his own makeup (he used cotton
balls to simulate the character's puffed cheeks). Coppola had feared Brando might be too young
to play the Don, but was electrified by the actor's characterization as the head of a crime family.
Even so, he had to fight the studio in order to cast the temperamental actor. Brando had doubts
himself, stating in his autobiography, "I had never played an Italian before, and I didn't think I
could do it successfully." Eventually, Charles Bluhdorn, the president of Paramount parent
Gulf+Western, was won over to letting Brando have the role; when he saw the screen test, he
asked in amazement, "What are we watching? Who is this old guinea?" Brando was signed for a
low fee of $50,000, but in his contract, he was given a percentage of the gross on a sliding scale:
1% of the gross for each $10 million over a $10 million threshold, up to 5% if the picture
exceeded $60 million. According to Evans, Brando sold back his points in the picture for
$100,000, as he was in dire need of funds. "That $100,000 cost him $11 million," Evans
claimed.[56]

In a 1994 interview that can be found on the Academy of Achievement website, Coppola
insisted, "The Godfather was a very unappreciated movie when we were making it. They were
very unhappy with it. They didn't like the cast. They didn't like the way I was shooting it. I was
always on the verge of getting fired." When word of this reached Brando, he threatened to walk
off the picture, writing in his memoir, "I strongly believe that directors are entitled to
independence and freedom to realize their vision, though Francis left the characterizations in
our hands and we had to figure out what to do." In a 2010 television interview with Larry King,
Al Pacino also talked about how Brando's support helped him keep the role of Michael Corleone
in the movie—despite the fact Coppola wanted to fire him. Pacino also explained in the Larry
King interview that, while Coppola expressed disappointment in Pacino's early scenes, he did
not specifically threaten to fire him; Coppola himself was feeling pressure from studio
executives who were puzzled by Pacino's performance. In the same interview, Pacino credits
Coppola with getting him the part.[57][58] Brando was on his best behavior during filming,
buoyed by a cast that included Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and Diane Keaton. In the
Vanity Fair article "The Godfather Wars", Mark Seal writes, "With the actors, as in the movie,
Brando served as the head of the family. He broke the ice by toasting the group with a glass of
wine."[59] 'When we were young, Brando was like the godfather of actors,' says Robert Duvall. 'I
used to meet with Dustin Hoffman in Cromwell's Drugstore, and if we mentioned his name
once, we mentioned it 25 times in a day.' Caan adds, 'The first day we met Brando everybody
was in awe.'"

Brando's performance was glowingly reviewed by critics. "I thought it would be interesting to
play a gangster, maybe for the first time in the movies, who wasn't like those bad guys Edward
G. Robinson played, but who is kind of a hero, a man to be respected," Brando recalled in his
autobiography. "Also, because he had so much power and unquestioned authority, I thought it
would be an interesting contrast to play him as a gentle man, unlike Al Capone, who beat up
people with baseball bats." Duvall later marveled to A&E's Biography, "He minimized the sense
of beginning. In other words he, like, deemphasized the word action. He would go in front of
that camera just like he was before. Cut! It was all the same. There was really no beginning. I
learned a lot from watching that." Brando won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his
performance, but he declined it, becoming the second actor to refuse a Best Actor award (after
George C. Scott for Patton). Brando did not attend the award ceremony; instead, he sent actress
Sacheen Littlefeather (who appeared in Plains Indian-style regalia) to decline the Oscar on his
behalf.[60] After refusing to touch the statue at the podium, she announced to the crowd that
Brando was rejecting the award in protest of "the treatment of American Indians today by the
film industry … and on television and movie reruns and also with recent happenings at
Wounded Knee." The Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 was occurring at the time of the
ceremony.[61][62] Brando had written a longer speech for her to read but, as she explained, this

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was not permitted due to time constraints. In the written speech Brando added that he hoped
his declining the Oscar would be seen as "an earnest effort to focus attention on an issue that
might very well determine whether or not this country has the right to say from this point
forward we believe in the inalienable rights of all people to remain free and independent on
lands that have supported their life beyond living memory."[63]

The actor followed The Godfather with Bernardo

Bertolucci's 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, playing opposite
Maria Schneider, but Brando's highly noted performance
threatened to be overshadowed by an uproar over the sexual
content of the film. Brando portrays a recent American
widower named Paul, who begins an anonymous sexual
relationship with a young, betrothed Parisian woman named
Jeanne. As with previous films, Brando refused to memorize
his lines for many scenes; instead, he wrote his lines on cue
Brando as a guest at The Dick cards and posted them around the set for easy reference,
Cavett Show in 1973, following the leaving Bertolucci with the problem of keeping them out of
success of The Godfather. [64] the picture frame. The film features several intense, graphic
scenes involving Brando, including Paul anally raping
Jeanne using butter as a lubricant, which it was alleged was
not consensual. [65] The actress confirmed that no actual sex occurred, but she complained that
she was not told what the scene would include until shortly prior to filming.[66]

Bertolucci also shot a scene which showed Brando's genitals, but in 1973 explained, "I had so
identified myself with Brando that I cut it out of shame for myself. To show him naked would
have been like showing me naked."[67] Schneider declared in an interview that "Marlon said he
felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48. And he was Marlon Brando!".[67] Like
Schneider, Brando confirmed that the sex was simulated.[68] Bertolucci said about Brando that
he was "a monster as an actor and a darling as a human being". Brando refused to speak to
Bertolucci for 15 years after the production was completed. Bertolucci said:

I was thinking that it was like a dialogue where he was really answering my
questions in a way. When at the end of the movie, when he saw it, I discovered that
he realized what we were doing, that he was delivering so much of his own
experience. And he was very upset with me, and I told him, "Listen, you are a grown-
up. Older than me. Didn't you realize what you were doing?" And he didn't talk to me
for years.[69][70]

However;

I called him one day in '93, I think, I was in LA and my wife was shooting a movie.
First of all, he answered the phone, and he was talking to me like we had seen each
other a day earlier. He said, "Come here." I said, "When?" He said, "Now." So I
remember driving on Mulholland Drive to his home and thinking I think I won't
make it, I think I will crash before [I get there]. I was so emotional.

The film also features Paul's angry, emotionally charged final confrontation with the corpse of
his dead wife. The controversial movie was a hit however, and Brando made the list of Top Ten
Box Office Stars for the last time. His gross participation deal earned him $3 million.[71] The
voting membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences again nominated Brando

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for Best Actor, his seventh nomination. Brando won the 1973 New York Film Critics Circle
Award for Best Actor.[72]

Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker review, wrote "The movie breakthrough has finally come.
Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form."[73] Brando confessed in his
autobiography, "To this day I can't say what Last Tango in Paris was about", and added the film
"required me to do a lot of emotional arm wrestling with myself, and when it was finished, I
decided that I wasn't ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie".[74]

In 1973, Brando was devastated by the death of his childhood best friend Wally Cox. Brando
wrenched his ashes from his widow, who was going to sue for their return, but finally said,
"Marlon needed the ashes more than I did."[75]

Late 1970s

In 1976, Brando appeared in The Missouri Breaks with his friend Jack Nicholson. The movie
also reunited the actor with director Arthur Penn. As biographer Stefan Kanfer describes, Penn
had difficulty controlling Brando, who seemed intent on going over the top with his border-
ruffian-turned-contract-killer Robert E. Lee Clayton: "Marlon made him a cross-dressing
psychopath. Absent for the first hour of the movie, Clayton enters on horseback, dangling
upside down, caparisoned in white buckskin, Littlefeather-style. He speaks in an Irish accent for
no apparent reason. Over the next hour, also for no apparent reason, Clayton assumes the
intonation of a British upper-class twit and an elderly frontier woman, complete with a granny
dress and matching bonnet. Penn, who believed in letting actors do their thing, indulged Marlon
all the way."[76] Critics were unkind, with The Observer calling Brando's performance "one of
the most extravagant displays of grandedamerie since Sarah Bernhardt",[77] while The Sun
complained, "Marlon Brando at fifty-two has the sloppy belly of a sixty-two-year-old, the white
hair of a seventy-two-year-old, and the lack of discipline of a precocious twelve-year-old."[77]
However, Kanfer noted: "Even though his late work was met with disapproval, a re-examination
shows that often, in the middle of the most pedestrian scene, there would be a sudden, luminous
occurrence, a flash of the old Marlon that showed how capable he remained."[77]

In 1978, Brando narrated the English version of Raoni, a French-Belgian documentary film
directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni
Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the Indigenous tribes in north central Brazil.
Brando portrayed Superman's father Jor-El in the 1978 film Superman. He agreed to the role
only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he
would not have to read the script beforehand, and that his lines would be displayed somewhere
off-camera. It was revealed in a documentary contained in the 2001 DVD release of Superman
that he was paid $3.7 million for two weeks of work. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's
sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received
for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage. "I asked for my usual
percentage," he recollected in his memoir, "but they refused, and so did I." However, after
Brando's death, the footage was reincorporated into the 2006 recut of the film, Superman II:
The Richard Donner Cut and in the 2006 "loose sequel" Superman Returns, in which both used
and unused archive footage of him as Jor-El from the first two Superman films was remastered
for a scene in the Fortress of Solitude, and Brando's voice-overs were used throughout the film.
In 1979, he made a rare television appearance in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations,
portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding
Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance.[78]

Brando starred as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam epic Apocalypse

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Now (1979). He plays a highly decorated U.S. Army Special Forces officer who goes renegade,
running his own operation based in Cambodia and is feared by the U.S. military as much as the
Vietnamese. Brando was paid $1 million a week for 3 weeks work. The film drew attention for
its lengthy and troubled production, as Eleanor Coppola's documentary Hearts of Darkness: A
Filmmaker's Apocalypse documents: Brando showed up on the set overweight, Martin Sheen
suffered a heart attack, and severe weather destroyed several expensive sets. The film's release
was also postponed several times while Coppola edited millions of feet of footage. In the
documentary, Coppola talks about how astonished he was when an overweight Brando turned
up for his scenes and, feeling desperate, decided to portray Kurtz, who appears emaciated in the
original story, as a man who had indulged every aspect of himself. Coppola: "He was already
heavy when I hired him and he promised me that he was going to get in shape and I imagined
that I would, if he were heavy, I could use that. But he was so fat, he was very, very shy about
it ... He was very, very adamant about how he didn't want to portray himself that way." Brando
admitted to Coppola that he had not read the book, Heart of Darkness, as the director had
asked him to, and the pair spent days exploring the story and the character of Kurtz, much to
the actor's financial benefit, according to producer Fred Roos: "The clock was ticking on this
deal he had and we had to finish him within three weeks or we'd go into this very expensive
overage ... And Francis and Marlon would be talking about the character and whole days would
go by. And this is at Marlon's urging—and yet he's getting paid for it."

Upon release, Apocalypse Now earned critical acclaim, as did Brando's performance. His
whispering of Kurtz's final words "The horror! The horror!", has become particularly famous.
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, defended the movie's controversial
denouement, opining that the ending, "with Brando's fuzzy, brooding monologues and the final
violence, feels much more satisfactory than any conventional ending possibly could."[79] Brando
received a fee of $2 million plus 10% of the gross theatrical rental and 10% of the TV sale rights,
earning him around $9 million.[80][81]

Later work

After appearing as oil tycoon Adam Steiffel in 1980's The Formula, which was poorly received
critically, Brando announced his retirement from acting. However, he returned in 1989 in A Dry
White Season, based on André Brink's 1979 anti-apartheid novel. Brando agreed to do the film
for free, but fell out with director Euzhan Palcy over how the film was edited; he even made a
rare television appearance in an interview with Connie Chung to voice his disapproval. In his
memoir, he maintained that Palcy "had cut the picture so poorly, I thought, that the inherent
drama of this conflict was vague at best." Brando received praise for his performance, earning
an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and winning the Best Actor Award at
the Tokyo Film Festival.

Brando scored enthusiastic reviews for his caricature of his Vito Corleone role as Carmine
Sabatini in 1990's The Freshman. In his original review, Roger Ebert wrote, "There have been a
lot of movies where stars have repeated the triumphs of their parts—but has any star ever done
it more triumphantly than Marlon Brando does in The Freshman?"[82] Variety also praised
Brando's performance as Sabatini and noted, "Marlon Brando's sublime comedy performance
elevates The Freshman from screwball comedy to a quirky niche in film history."[83] Brando
starred alongside his friend Johnny Depp on the box office hit Don Juan DeMarco (1995), in
which he also shared credits with singer Selena in her only filming appearance,[84] and in
Depp's controversial The Brave (1997), which was never released in the United States.[85]

Later performances, such as his appearance in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992)
(for which he was nominated for a Raspberry as "Worst Supporting Actor"), The Island of Dr.

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Moreau (in which he won a "Worst Supporting Actor" Raspberry) (1996), and his barely
recognizable appearance in Free Money (1998), resulted in some of the worst reviews of his
career. The Island of Dr. Moreau screenwriter Ron Hutchinson would later say in his memoir,
Clinging to the Iceberg: Writing for a Living on the Stage and in Hollywood (2017), that
Brando sabotaged the film's production by feuding and refusing to cooperate with his colleagues
and the film crew.[86]

Unlike its immediate predecessors, Brando's last completed film, The Score (2001), was
received generally positively. In the film, in which he portrays a fence, he starred with Robert De
Niro.

After Brando's death, the novel Fan-Tan was released. Brando conceived the novel with director
Donald Cammell in 1979, but it was not released until 2005.[87]

Final years and death

Brando's notoriety, his troubled family life and his obesity attracted more attention than his late
acting career. He gained a great deal of weight in the 1970s; by the early-to-mid-1990s he
weighed over 300 pounds (140 kg) and suffered from Type 2 diabetes. He had a history of
weight fluctuation throughout his career that, by and large, he attributed to his years of stress-
related overeating followed by compensatory dieting. He also earned a reputation for being
difficult on the set, often unwilling or unable to memorize his lines and less interested in taking
direction than in confronting the film director with odd demands. He also dabbled with some
innovation in his last years. He had several patents issued in his name from the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office, all of which involve a method of tensioning drumheads, between June 2002
and November 2004 (for example, see U.S. Patent 6,812,392 (https://patents.google.com/paten
t/US6812392)).[88] His assistant, Alice Marchak, resigned from her role due to his eccentric and
unpredictable behavior.[89]

In 2004, Brando recorded voice tracks for the character Mrs. Sour in the unreleased animated
film Big Bug Man. This was his last role and his only role as a female character.[90]

A longtime close friend of entertainer Michael Jackson, Brando paid regular visits to his
Neverland Ranch, resting there for weeks at a time. Brando also participated in the singer's two-
day solo career 30th-anniversary celebration concerts in 2001 and starred in his 13-minute-long
music video "You Rock My World", in the same year.

The actor's son, Miko, was Jackson's bodyguard and assistant for several years and was a friend
of the singer. "The last time my father left his house to go anywhere, to spend any kind of time,
it was with Michael Jackson", Miko stated. "He loved it ... He had a 24-hour chef, 24-hour
security, 24-hour help, 24-hour kitchen, 24-hour maid service. Just carte blanche."[91] "Michael
was instrumental helping my father through the last few years of his life. For that I will always
be indebted to him. Dad had a hard time breathing in his final days and he was on oxygen much
of the time. He loved the outdoors, so Michael would invite him over to Neverland. Dad could
name all the trees there and the flowers, but being on oxygen it was hard for him to get around
and see them all, it's such a big place. So Michael got Dad a golf cart with a portable oxygen tank
so he could go around and enjoy Neverland. They'd just drive around—Michael Jackson, Marlon
Brando, with an oxygen tank in a golf cart."[92] In April 2001, Brando was hospitalized with
pneumonia.[93]

In 2004, Brando signed with Tunisian film director Ridha Behi and began preproduction on a
project to be titled Brando and Brando. Up to a week before his death, he was working on the
script in anticipation of a July/August 2004 start date.[94] Production was suspended in July

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2004 following Brando's death, at which time Behi stated that he would continue the film as an
homage to Brando,[95] with a new title of Citizen Brando.[96][97]

On July 1, 2004, Brando died of respiratory failure from pulmonary fibrosis with congestive
heart failure at the UCLA Medical Center.[98] The cause of death was initially withheld, with his
lawyer citing privacy concerns. He also suffered from diabetes and liver cancer.[99] Shortly
before his death and despite needing an oxygen mask to breathe, he recorded his voice to
appear in The Godfather: The Game, once again as Don Vito Corleone. However, Brando
recorded only one line due to his health and an impersonator was hired to finish his lines. His
single recorded line was included within the final game as a tribute to the actor. Some additional
lines from his character were directly lifted from the film. Karl Malden—Brando's co-star in
three films (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and One-Eyed Jacks)—spoke in a
documentary accompanying the DVD of A Streetcar Named Desire about a phone call he
received from Brando shortly before Brando's death. A distressed Brando told Malden he kept
falling over. Malden wanted to come over, but Brando put him off, telling him there was no
point. Three weeks later, Brando was dead. Shortly before his death, he had apparently refused
permission for tubes carrying oxygen to be inserted into his lungs, which, he was told, was the
only way to prolong his life.[100]

Brando was cremated and his ashes were put in with those of Wally Cox.[101] They were then
scattered partly in Tahiti and partly in Death Valley.[102]

Personal life
Brando was known for his tumultuous personal life and his large number of partners and
children. He was the father to at least 11 children, three of whom were adopted.[103][104] In 1976,
he told a French journalist, "Homosexuality is so much in fashion, it no longer makes news. Like
a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed. I have
never paid much attention to what people think about me. But if there is someone who is
convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing."
[105][106]

During the 1947 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando became enamored with
fellow cast member Sandy Campbell,[107] who played the minor role of the young collector.
Brando had asked Campbell to have an affair with him and was often seen standing in the wings
with Campbell and holding his hand.[108] According to Truman Capote, both Campbell and
Brando confessed to having been in a sexual relationship.[109] "I asked Marlon, and he admitted
it. He said he went to bed with lots of other men, too, but that he didn’t consider himself a
homosexual. He said they were all so attracted to him. 'I just thought that I was doing them a
favor,' he said."[110] In his 1957 interview with Brando for The New Yorker, Capote claimed to
have first encountered Brando at a rehearsal for A Streetcar Named Desire while he was
sleeping on a table on the stage in an empty auditorium.[111] However, the story was
appropriated from Sandy Campbell, as confirmed by his partner, Donald Windham.[112][113]

In Songs My Mother Taught Me, Brando wrote that he met Marilyn Monroe at a party where
she played piano, unnoticed by anybody else there, that they had an affair and maintained an
intermittent relationship for many years, and that he received a telephone call from her several
days before she died. He also claimed numerous other romances, although he did not discuss
his marriages, his wives, or his children in his autobiography.[114]

He met nisei actress and dancer Reiko Sato in the early 1950s. Though their relationship cooled,
they remained friends for the rest of Sato's life, with her dividing her time between Los Angeles

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and Tetiaroa in her later years.[115][116] In 1954 Dorothy Kilgallen reported they were an item.
Brando also dated actress Ariane "Pat" Quinn.

Brando was smitten with the Mexican actress Katy Jurado after
seeing her in High Noon. They met when Brando was filming Viva
Zapata! in Mexico. Brando told Joseph L. Mankiewicz that he was
attracted to "her enigmatic eyes, black as hell, pointing at you like
fiery arrows".[117] Their first date became the beginning of an
extended affair that lasted many years and peaked at the time they
worked together on One-Eyed Jacks (1960), a film directed by
Brando.[117]

Brando met actress Rita Moreno in 1954, and they began a love
affair. Moreno later revealed in her memoir that when she became
pregnant by Brando he arranged for an abortion. After the abortion
Katy Jurado in 1953 was botched and Brando fell in love with Tarita Teriipaia, Moreno
attempted suicide by overdosing on Brando's sleeping pills.[118]
Years after they broke up, Moreno played his love interest in the
film The Night of the Following Day.

Brando was briefly engaged to the 19 year-old French actress Josanne Mariani whom he met in
1954. They broke their engagement when Brando discovered that his other girlfriend, Anna
Kashfi, was pregnant and went on to marry her instead.[119][120]

Brando married actress Anna Kashfi in 1957.[121] Kashfi was born in Calcutta and moved to
Wales from India in 1947. She is the daughter of a Welsh steel worker of Irish descent, William
O'Callaghan, who had been superintendent on the Indian State railways, and his Welsh wife
Phoebe. However, in her book, Brando for Breakfast, Kashfi claimed that she was half Indian
and that O'Callaghan was her stepfather. She claimed that her biological father was Indian and
that she was the result of an "unregistered alliance" between her parents. Brando and Kashfi
had a son, Christian Brando, on May 11, 1958; they divorced in 1959.[122]

In 1960, Brando married Movita Castaneda, a Mexican-American

actress; the marriage was annulled in 1968 after it was discovered
her previous marriage was still active.[123] Castaneda had appeared
in the first Mutiny on the Bounty film in 1935, some 27 years before
the 1962 remake with Brando as Fletcher Christian. They had two
children together: Miko Castaneda Brando (born 1961) and
Rebecca Brando (born 1966).[124]

French actress Tarita Teriipaia, who played Brando's love interest

Movita Castaneda in
in Mutiny on the Bounty, became his third wife on August 10, 1962.
Paradise Isle (1937)
She was 20 years old, 18 years younger than Brando, who was
reportedly delighted by her naïveté.[125] Because Teriipaia was a
native French speaker, Brando became fluent in the language and gave numerous interviews in
French.[126][127] Brando and Teriipaia had two children together: Simon Teihotu Brando (born
1963) and Tarita Cheyenne Brando (1970–1995). Brando also adopted Teriipaia's daughter,
Maimiti Brando (born 1977) and niece, Raiatua Brando (born 1982). Brando and Teriipaia
divorced in July 1972.

After Brando's death, the daughter of actress Cynthia Lynn claimed that Brando had had a
short-lived affair with her mother, who appeared with Brando in Bedtime Story, and that this
affair resulted in her birth in 1964.[128] Throughout the late 1960s and into the early 1980s, he

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