Marlon Brando changed Hollywood with his macho acting style and sexual appeal. But what may be a surprise to many is that he was a bisexual sex fiend who slept with plenty of Hollywood’s biggest male stars.
The two-time Oscar winner had three wives, multiple mistresses and at least fifteen children. With roles like Vito Corleone in The Godfather, which is regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made, Brando still found time to sleep with screen legends. Join us as we delve deep into Brando’s surprising sexual obsessions and reveal which Hollywood superstars he took to bed.
The Hollywood rebel
Marlon Brando’s career spanned sixty years, during which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice. He is regarded as arguably the greatest and most influential actor in 20th-century film.Brando was also an activist for many causes, notably the civil rights movement and various Native American movements.
Brando’s performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, was a career turning point, putting him back in the Top Ten after a slip in his career, and earned him his second Best Actor Oscar.
As a supporter of the American Indian Movement, at the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony, Brando refused to accept the Oscar for his performance.
Sacheen Littlefeather represented him and appeared in full Apache attire. She stated in her speech that owing to the poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry, Brando would not accept the award.This occurred while the standoff at Wounded Knee was ongoing.
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, and by the 1990s he weighed over 300 pounds and suffered from Type 2 diabetes.
On July 1st, 2004, Brando died of respiratory failure from pulmonary fibrosis with congestive heart failure.
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A childhood of trauma
In the wheat fields and open landscape of Omaha, Marlon Brando grew close to his mother, Dodie Pennebaker Brando who had the soul of an artist. Dodie was a sculptor, a poet, and an actress. She was a woman who saw the beauty in life.
She taught him to love nature, the frogs and tadpoles in the creek, the sunsets, and the magic of the universe. It was inevitably his mother’s disintegration that became the sole reason Brando would later turn to women for solace.
Brando’s relationship with his father was far from loving. Brando was never able to truly escape the trauma created by his father who beat him and his mother. Fueled by booze and anger, Brando Sr.’s rage and violence came to define their lives. Dodie tried to defend her son from such tirades, but it didn’t get them anywhere. Brando Sr. simply lacked affection.
This led to Dodie turning to the bottle and swallowing pills in an attempt at suicide. She physically recovered but soon left the abusive home. Such an intolerable home life turned Brando into a rebellious troublemaker. He would carry around a knife and slash tires, and shoot his BB gun from his house window, once hitting a man in the neck.
Dodie eventually came back but wasn’t able to quit her drinking. One night, his father brought her home drunk, carried her upstairs and then began to beat her. Brando heard the attack and raced upstairs to protect his mother. He promised he would kill his father if he hit her again. Brando Sr. responded by sending his son off to Shattuck Military Academy in Minnesota to straighten out.
At the military academy Brando was introduced to drama classes, encouraged by the head of the English department, Duke Wagner. This would prove to be the spark of Brando’s great future. Wagner was later expelled from the academy for having relationships with cadets. Brando was also eventually expelled.
The future Hollywood star finally escaped the Midwest and headed for New York City. He took drama classes, and was a student in Stella Adler’s dramatic Workshop. As one of the founding members of the Group Theatre in New York, Stella created the Group and was committed to a modern, naturalistic American theatre.
Adler believed that a person’s life is one-millionth of what they know. She would push the message that a person’s talent is their imagination. Brando connected to this philosophy. She recognised his talent and became a nurturing, supportive mother figure that his own mother couldn’t be. She made him an honorary Jew.
Brando learned Yiddish, read the classics and finally found his tribe. He believed that he was never educated until he was exposed to Jews. He was introduced to a sense of culture. Brando developed a relationship with Adler’s daughter, Ellen, who became one of the great loves of Brando. But Ellen also understood that no woman could be first in Brando’s heart, and knew that there would be no proposal from him.
While Brando found success and fame in Hollywood, he went through years of psychotherapy. With such treatment, Brando had help focusing on the dark and paralyzing memories of his childhood. He was diagnosed as psychoneurotic with a chronic anxiety that stopped short of delusions or hallucinations. This condition created panic attacks, paranoia and depression.
Suffering with post-traumatic stress from his youth, Brando was left in misery and overwhelmed by the fear that he was being destroyed by his fame. He wished to be a normal person. Eventually, he fled from the intrusive press and hid away from the public eye. The only reason he made movies was because of a promise he made to his dying mother. It was originally her dream to be an actor.
Brando’s sexual obsession
Marlon Brando had several true passions; social justice, women and sex. Brando needed different girlfriends for different days of the week. He slept with the wives of his friends, since he found married women to be a more exciting pursuit.
While Brando was in Adler’s class, he acted to survive but it was sex that made him happy and that’s all that mattered to him as he compulsively pursued it. One of the most famous of his pursuits was Marilyn Monroe. He shared a romance with the blonde bombshell in 1955 following her divorce from Joe DiMaggio and before her marriage to Arthur Miller. Monroe wasn’t Brando’s type, but she undoubtedly had a sense of humor that he would have liked.
Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno spoke of Brando, “To say that he was a great lover, sensual, generous, delightfully inventive, would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body but for my soul.”
Brando awakened Moreno’s political conscience but initially kept their relationship secret. This was possibly due to Brando also having a blistering affair with Josanne Mariani, a pretty nineteen year old French girl. He had asked Mariani to marry him even though he had no intention of doing so.
Brando knew that he could seduce any woman he wanted, and he did. He had countless affairs, far too many for any normal or reasonable person.
American actress Jill Banner, best known for her role as Virginia in the cult horror-comedy, Spider Baby, met Brando on the set of the film, Candy. They began a romantic relationship, but their love affair suffered due to Brando’s continual flings with other women. Banner found him manipulative and selfish.
Brando hoped to reconnect and salvage their relationship, but it came too late. On August 7th, 1982, Banner’s car was hit by a truck on the Ventura Freeway. Thrown from the vehicle, she died at North Hollywood’s Riverside Hospital at the age of thirty five.
Brando later acknowledged that Banner was the only woman he ever truly loved.
Breaking binary rules
Brando never restricted himself to women and he pursued homosexual relations with absolute ease. Brando exuded raw sexuality to straight and gay, male and female and he took full advantage of it.
According to author Darwin Porter’s tell-all book, “Brando Unzipped.” American actor Burt Lancaster was still in his 30s when he hooked up with a much-younger Brando. Brando invited Lancaster to the gym where they worked out together and presumably showered together. It’s believed that in the shower a passionate but brief affair occurred between them.
Brando had a longer lasting sexual relationship with Hollywood heartthrob, James Dean. The screen icons met in 1949, when Brando gave a talk at the Actor’s Studio. Dean worshipped Brando, telling him that he was his greatest fan.
Dean would act like Brando’s puppy dog, even waiting in the cold outside Brando’s apartment hoping to be invited in for a sexual engagement.
Many believe that Brando’s own great love was Wally Cox, an American actor and comedian, most associated with the early years of television. The actors lived together in New York City early in their careers.
After Cox’s death in 1973, Brando’s will specified that his ashes be mixed with Cox’s before being scattered in Tahiti and Death Valley
Brando passed away in July of 2004 at the age of eighty. After his death, lovers came out of the woodwork. Many came as a great surprise, including Richard Pryor’s widow claiming the comedian had an affair with Brando, as did record producer Quincy Jones.
It’s been revealed that while Brando was at the Shattuck Military academy, he had slept with another young man on campus. Later in life, Brando would occasionally leave the city for Provincetown, which was an artist colony out on the tip of Cape Cod where gender and sex were highly flexible.
Brando, feeling no shame of his passions, went public about his desires. In 1976 he said, “Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed.” Being sexually happy was all that ever mattered to Brando.
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