Trivia

Expelled from high school for riding a motorcycle through the halls.

He was an avid user of the Internet in his final years, often going into chat rooms to start arguments.

His signature was considered so valuable to collectors that many personal checks he wrote were never cashed. This was because his signature was usually worth more than the amount on the check.

During an acting class, when the students were told to act out "a chicken hearing an air-raid siren", most of the students clucked and flapped their arms in a panic, while Brando stood stock-still, staring up at the ceiling. When asked to explain himself, Brando replied, "I'm a chicken - I don't know what an air-raid siren is.".

In his autobiography, he said that he was physically attracted to Vivien Leigh during the making of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). However, he could not bring himself to seduce her, as he found her husband, Laurence Olivier, to be such a "nice guy".

Asked The Godfather (1972) co-star James Caan what he would want if his wishes came true. When Caan answered that he would like to be in love, Brando answered, "Me too. But don't tell my wife.".

Two years before Brando declined his Oscar for Best Actor in The Godfather (1972), he had applied to the Academy to replace the one he had won for On the Waterfront (1954), which had been stolen. Prior to its theft, Brando had been using the Oscar as a doorstop.

Shortly before his death, his doctors had told him that the only way to prolong his life would be to insert tubes carrying oxygen into his lungs. He refused permission, preferring to die naturally.

His best friend was Wally Cox, whom he had known as a child and then met again when both were aspiring actors in New York during the 1940s. According to Brando's autobiography, there was not a day that went by when he did not think of Wally. So close did he feel to Cox, he even kept the pajamas he died in.

He was offered a chance to reprise his role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974) and Jor El in Superman II (1980), but he turned them both down due to his own credo that once he finished a role, he put it away and moved on. He turned down both films despite being offered three times more money than any of his co-stars.

Contrary to popular belief, Brando was not an atheist. At his son's trial, where he supposedly revealed his atheism and refused to swear upon a Bible, his actual words were, "While I do believe in God, I do not believe in the same way as others, so I would prefer not to swear on the Bible.".

While filming The Score (2001), he refused to be on the set at the same time as director Frank Oz, referring to the former "Muppets" director as "Miss Piggy".

In his book "The Way It's Never Been Done Before: My Friendship with Marlon Brando", George Englund relates how Brando told him a couple of years before his death that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences offered him a Lifetime Achievement Oscar on the condition that he attend the ceremony to personally accept the award. Brando refused, believing that the offer should not be conditional, and that the condition that he appear on the televised ceremony showed that the Academy was not primarily focused on honoring artistic excellence.

He used cue cards in many of his movies because he refused to memorize his lines. His lines were written on the diaper of the baby, "Kal-El", in Superman (1978).

Received top billing in nearly every film he appeared in, even if not cast in the lead role.

He did not like to sign autographs for collectors. Because of this, his own autograph became so valuable that many checks he wrote went uncashed--his signature on them was worth more than the value of the check itself. Ironically, his secretary Alice Marchak remembered a time when a fan asked for his autograph. Brando promptly signed the fan's autograph book twice. Brando then told the fan that he had heard that one John Wayne autograph was equal to two Marlon Brando's on the collector's market.

Lived on infamous "Bad Boy Drive" (Muholland Drive in Beverly Hills, California), which received its nickname because its residents were famous "bad boy" actors Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Brando.

His son Miko C. Brando was once a bodyguard for Michael Jackson. Jackson and Brando remained good friends thereafter.

At the time of his death at age 80, Brando had been suffering from congestive heart failure, advanced diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis (damage to the tissue inside the lungs resulting from a bout of pneumonia in 2001). Doctors had recently discovered a tumor inside his liver, but he died before they could operate to remove it.

Shortly before his death in 2004, he gave EA Games permission to use his voice for its video game The Godfather (2006).

Paramount studio brass wanted him to appear as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (1974), but he wanted $4 million, an unheard-of salary at the time.

Brando tried to join the Army during World War II but was rejected due to a knee injury he had sustained while playing football at Shattuck Military Academy. After he made The Men (1950), the Korean War broke out, and he was ordered by the draft board to report for a physical prior to induction. As his knee was better due to an operation, he initially was reclassified from 4-F to 1-A, but the military again rejected him, this time for mental problems, as he was under psychoanalysis.

Said that the only reason he continued to make movies was in order to raise the money to produce what he said would be the "definitive" film about Native Americans. The film was never made.

Believed that he could control stress in his life and physical pain through meditation. So sure he was of this, that he wanted to prove it. When he decided in the early 1990s to be circumcised, he wanted the doctor to do the operation with no anesthesia so that he could show off this skill. The doctor refused because of medical ethics, but Brando underwent the operation anyway after receiving a painkilling shot in his back. However, he wanted to show the doctors what he could do, and he asked them to take his blood pressure. Through meditation, he brought his blood pressure down more than 20 points.

Eldest son Christian Brando was arrested for murdering his half-sister's boyfriend Dag Drollet in 1990. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in March 1991 and released in January 1996.

Spoke French fluently, from his marriage to his Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) co-star Tarita.

He constantly referred to his good friend Johnny Depp as "the most talented actor of his generation".

He allegedly refused to be interviewed for Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) (a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now (1979)) because he claimed Francis Ford Coppola still owed him $2 million.

One of the innovators of the Method acting technique in American film.

Received more money for his short appearance as Jor-El in Superman (1978) than Christopher Reeve did in the title role. Brando later sued for a percentage of the film's profits.

Both of his Oscar-winning roles have been referenced in the Oscar-winning roles of Robert De Niro. DeNiro played the younger version of his character, Vito Corleone, in The Godfather Part II (1974). Brando's first Oscar was for On the Waterfront (1954), where his famous lines were "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could been somebody." DeNiro imitates this monologue in Raging Bull (1980), which won him his second Oscar.

Daughter Cheyenne committed suicide in 1995, aged 25.

Brando enjoyed talking to strangers on other islands or passing boats on his ham radio anonymously. He did not used his real name, and often called himself "Mike" or "Matin Bumby" and spoke in very believable French, German and Japanese accents.

Tithed a tenth of his income to various black civil-rights organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He reputedly suggested that his cameo role as Jor-El in Superman (1978) be done by him in voice-over only, with the character's image onscreen being a glowing, levitating green bagel. Unsure if Brando was joking or not, the film's producers formally rejected the suggestion.

Was roommates with childhood friend Wally Cox during his theatrical training in New York City. The two remained lifelong friends, and Brando took Cox's sudden death from a heart attack at age 48 extremely hard.

His ashes were scattered in Tahiti and Death Valley.

Brando donated his $25,000 salary for his one day of work on Roots: The Next Generations (1979) to the American Indian Movement.

Born to alcoholic parents, Brando was left alone much of the time as a child.

Helped out a great deal of minorities in America, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native American Indians.

A collection of personal effects from Brando's estate fetched $2,378,300 at a June 30, 2005 auction at Christie's New York. His annotated script from The Godfather (1972) was bought for a world record $312,800. "Godfather" memorabilia were the most sought-after items at the 6.5-hour auction, which attracted over 500 spectators and bidders and multiple telephone bids. Brando's annotated film script originally was figured to sell at between $10,000 and $15,000, but brought more than 20 times the high end of the pre-auction estimate. The previous record for a film script bought at auction was $244,500 for Clark Gable's Gone with the Wind (1939) script, which was auctioned at Christie's New York in 1996. A letter from "Godfather" writer Mario Puzo to Brando asking him to consider playing the role of Don Corleone in the movie version of his novel was bought for $132,000. A photograph of Brando and former lover Rita Moreno in The Night of the Following Day (1969), the only piece of film memorabilia he kept in his Mulholland Drive home, was bought for $48,000. A transcript of a telegram from Brando to Marilyn Monroe after her 1961 nervous breakdown was bought for $36,000. His extensive library of over 3,600 books was sold in lots, some of which fetched over $45,000; many of the books were annotated in Brando's own hand.

He was close friends with the reclusive singer Michael Jackson for many years, even appearing in his music video "You Rock My World" in 2001. The last time Brando left his bungalow in Hollywood was to stay at Jackson's Neverland Ranch in the summer of 2003.

In the last three years of his life, Marlon filmed a series of classes of him giving acting lessons to Sean Penn, Jon Voight and Nick Nolte. Marlon intended to call the series "Lying for a Living" and to sell DVDs of it on shopping channel QVC to raise money. The DVDs were never released publicly following his death.

Even before he let himself get obese and balloon up to over 350 lb., his eating habits were legendary. The Men (1950) co-star Richard Erdman claimed Brando's diet circa 1950 consisted "mainly of junk food, usually take-out Chinese or peanut butter, which he consumed by the jarful". By the mid-1950s, he was renowned for eating boxes of Mallomars and cinnamon buns, washing them down with a quart of milk. Close friend Carlo Fiore wrote that in the 1950s and early 1960s, Brando went on crash diets before his films commenced shooting, but when he lost his willpower he would eat huge breakfasts consisting of corn flakes, sausages, eggs, bananas and cream, and a huge stack of pancakes drenched in syrup. Fiore was detailed by producers to drag him out of coffee shops. Karl Malden claimed that, during the shooting of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando would have "two steaks, potatoes, two apple pies a la mode and a quart of milk" for dinner, necessitating constant altering of his costumes. During a birthday party for Brando--the film's director as well as star--the crew gave him a belt with a card reading, "Hope it fits." A sign was placed below the birthday cake saying, "Don't feed the director." He reportedly ate at least four pieces of cake that day. His second wife Movita, who had a lock put on their refrigerator to stop pilfering by what she thought was the household staff, awoke one morning to find the lock broken and teeth marks on a round of cheese. The maid told her that Brando nightly raided the fridge. Movita also related how he often drove down to hot dog stands late at night (one of his favorite spots was the legendary Pink's Hot Dogs in Hollywood; it was open 24 hours a day, and Brando would go there at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and polish off a half-dozen hot dogs at a time). Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) costumer James Taylor claimed that Brando split the seat on 52 pairs of pants during the shooting of the film, necessitating that stretch fabric be sewn into his replacement duds. He split those, too. Ice cream was the culprit: Brando would purloin a five-gallon tub of the fattening dessert, row himself out into the lagoon and indulge. On the set of The Appaloosa (1966), Brando's double often had to be used for shooting after lunch, and filming could only proceed in long shots, as Brando could no longer fit into his costumes. Dick Loving, who was married to Brando's sister Frannie, said that Brando used to eat "two chickens at a sitting, and [go] through bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies." It was reported during the filming of The Missouri Breaks (1976) that the environmentally sensitive Brando fished a frog out of a pond, took a huge bite out of the hapless amphibian, and threw it back into the drink. Living on his island of Tetioroa, Brando created what he called "real-life Mounds Bars" by cracking open a coconut, melting some chocolate in the sun, then stirring it into the coconut for a tasty treat. By the 1980s, there were reports that one of his girlfriends had left him because he failed to keep his promise of losing weight. He seemed to be dieting, but to her astonishment, he never lost weight. She found out that his buddies had been throwing bags of Burger King Whoppers over the gates of his Mulholland Dr. estate late at night to relieve the hunger pangs of their famished friend. In the late 1980s, Brando was spotted regularly buying ice cream from a Beverly Hills ice cream shop--five gallons at a time. He supposedly confessed that he was eating it all himself. Finally, a reported Brando snack was a pound of cooked bacon shoved into an entire loaf of bread. When Brando became sick, he seriously cut back and lost 70 pounds on a bland diet, but never lost his love of food and especially ice cream.

He liked to box. While performing as Stanley Kowalski in the stage version of "A Streetcar Named Desire", he would often persuade a member of the stage crew to spar with him in a room underneath the stage between his acts. During one of these impromptu boxing matches, a crew member surprised him with a hard punch to the nose. Brando's nose was broken so badly that it literally was split across its bridge. He managed to go on stage and finish the play despite the fact that backstage efforts to stanch the bleeding had failed, but he was taken to the hospital immediately after. His famous broken-beak nose was the result of his having taken off his bandages in order to cover his nose with Mercurochrome to make it look particularly bad when he was visited by the play's producer, Irene Mayer Selznick. The subterfuge worked, as Selznick gave him two weeks off from the grind of the play (he was on stage with "Streetcar" for two years), but by taking the bandages off, his nose did not properly set.

His Mulholland Drive home once shared a driveway with his The Missouri Breaks (1976) co-star Jack Nicholson. Nicholson later bought Brando's home from his estate.

Bette Davis, who had presented Brando with his first Best Actor Oscar at the 27th Academy Awards in 1955, told the press that she was thrilled he had won. She elaborated, "He and I had much in common. He, too, had made many enemies. He, too, is a perfectionist.".

His Sacheen Littlefeather controversy at the Oscars resulted in the Academy setting stricter rules that nominees cannot send someone else to accept the award onstage or address the audience, and only the presenter is allowed to accept on the winner's behalf. Exceptions are made in the case that the honoree genuinely could not attend due to illness or death.

In the summer of 1995, he started shooting a movie called "Divine Rapture" in the tiny Irish village of Ballycotton, County Cork. His co-stars were Johnny Depp, Debra Winger and John Hurt. Marlon was playing a priest in the film and he had dyed his hair red for the role. Shooting began, but was never completed due to lack of financing.

Took possession of friend Wally Cox's ashes from his widow in order to scatter them at sea but actually kept them hidden in a closet at his house. In his autobiography, Brando said he frequently talked to Cox. The Los Angeles Times on September 22, 2004 quoted Brando's son, Miko, to the effect that both his father's and Cox's ashes were scattered at the same time in Death Valley, California in a ceremony following Brando's death.