Regards, Ivan
Posted on 06/27/2004 1:12:37 AM PDT by MadIvan
HE WAS one of the most influential actors of his generation, a lion on stage and screen. But the ailing Marlon Brando now lives alone in a one-bedroom bungalow, surviving with the support of a state pension and relying on the taxpayer to help him to care for his autistic young son.
The twilight existence of the Hollywood star is chronicled in a forthcoming biography that claims the 80-year-old actor owes banks nearly £11m and has grown so wary of debt collectors that he has hidden the Oscars he won for On the Waterfront and The Godfather.
To make matters worse, Cristina Ruiz, his former maid, is threatening to reopen a £55m “palimony” suit, claiming Brando has broken agreements signed last year to pay £5,500 a month support for three children, including Timothy, their autistic 10-year-old.
Until recently Brando could be spotted raiding ice-cream freezers at a supermarket near his Los Angeles home, having slipped away from nurses who chained his refrigerator door to prevent binge-eating. However, since he was struck by pneumonia in 2002 he has been seen in a wheelchair breathing through an oxygen mask.
For nearly half a century Brando has lived at 12900 Mulholland Drive, a mountain top address he shares with his neighbour, Jack Nicholson. He has discouraged visitors, prompting previous biographers to describe his home, Frangipani, as “the mansion in the sky”.
Court records obtained by The Sunday Times show that, in Brando’s own words, Frangipani is a one-bedroomed bungalow with a den converted from a garage. At 2,000 sq ft, it is about the same size as a four-bedroomed house in Britain. Aaron Spelling, the producer of Charlie’s Angels, lives nearby in a 56,000 sq ft house.
A recent visitor to Frangipani described it as claustrophobic, dominated by two shabby sofas and 1970s-era bead curtains, with burnt-out light bulbs. Its shrubby undergrowth is kept at bay by a gardener employed by Brando’s old friend Nicholson.
In Brando in Twilight, due to be published this autumn, Patricia Ruiz, a Los Angeles author who says she is not “directly” related to Brando’s former lover from Guatemala, writes that the actor was always eccentric but relatively happy and wealthy. This changed in 1990, when his eldest son Christian shot and killed Dag Drollet, the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne Brando, in the sitting room at Frangipani.
Brando, who had been renting the house, bought it several months later for £79,000 but borrowed heavily from banks to pay for his son’s trial. It ended with Christian going to jail for manslaughter and the actor £4m in debt, Ruiz claims. Cheyenne hanged herself in April 1995, a year before Christian’s release.
Although Brando was given a then-record £2.5m advance for 15 minutes of screen time in the 1978 film Superman, his career has since slumped. He has earned £3m since 1998 but spent £4m on Cristina Ruiz. Another £1m has gone on maintaining his South Pacific island.
Brando told LA’s superior court last year that his income consists primarily of a £3,200 a month pension from the Screen Actors Guild union and a £1,000-a-month state pension. “I received $50,000 total compensation for my work on The Godfather and do not receive any other residual income from any other film other than for Apocalypse Now.”
He said he could not afford life insurance and his own house was smaller than the £700,000 home he bought and renovated for his former maid, who then “cruelly manipulated” him and refused to let him see Timothy or his other children, Ninna and Myles.
The actor said that, in 1967, after filming Mutiny on the Bounty, he paid $200,000 (£110,000) for an atoll 20 miles north of Tahiti and blamed French regulations for his failure to turn this into an upscale eco-resort. Today the near-deserted island — valued by local estate agents at £1m — is a drain on his resources.
Patricia Ruiz claims Michael Jackson, a longtime friend of Brando, offered to buy the island, but ran into difficulties before a deal could be signed.
Accountants who have studied the actor’s finances suspect he may have glossed over other holdings but do not doubt he has fallen on hard times.
One accountant to the stars said he was only one of a number of household names from the 1950s and 1960s facing an uncertain old age.
A spokesman declined to comment on Brando’s financial affairs, but pointed out that he is returning to work, providing the voice-over for an animated character in a comedy called Big Bug Man.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Why am I not crying?
FYI and comment...
Wrong thread..my apologies!
Odd, seeing that a $1,700,000 loan was taken out on the property on Mulholland in 1997.
Must not be too bad of a property.
He wasted his money, his health, his looks and his talents. Apparantly, most of the "friends" from his well-known liberal hey-days are no longer worshipping at his feet as they can no longer use him.
I hope Marlon always has a roof over his head and food to eat even though he is a stupid voluptuary and hedonist. However, his self-inflicted troubles don't move me, just as his acting style didn't.
Leni
I know he's a lefty...But he was once an excellent actor. And he doesn't seem to be hateful...Just misguided. I'll never forget his support of MLK when it wasn't chic.
Pretty much any property on Mulholland would easily be worth more than 1.7 million. For the address, if nothing else. There's a number of "bungalow" sized places on Mullholland similar to the one described in the article that are inhabited by some very wealthy people. Of course, at the other end there's the Spelling-sized compounds. I couldn't even guess what his place would be worth.
Brando's place is on a decent sized chunk of land, at least in LA terms. So he's got that going for him too.
Blue Bell Ice Cream alert!
Duh. Sell the island dude. Anybody have a copy of the famous underwear photo? One second thought, let's not post that and pretend we did.
By the way, he filmed Bounty in 1961; the writer makes it sound as if he made it around 1966 or 1967.
And while we're on Bounty, that was the beginning of the end for him, when he became the most unprofessional actor in Hollywood. During a storm scene, instead of saying the words he was supposed to say, he yelled, "Mary had a little lamb ..." The scene had to be entirely reshot, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Largely because of him, the movie went way over budget, and tanked at the box office.
He showed up for the shooting of Apocalypse Now, in which he was slated to star as a special forces colonel, 100 pounds overweight, wrecking that production even worse than he had Bounty. Coppola had to rewite the entire story, with Brando going from the star to the then highest paid cameo in screen history. (He broke his own record with Superman, which was released the year before Apocalypse Now, but shot later. Apocalypse Now was a troubled prodcution for YEARS, again thanks to Marlon Brando.)
And in a recent movie in which he co-starred with Val Kilmer, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), he engaged in mischief on the set, and got Kilmer to go along with him on it, that sank the production, causing the film to arrive still-born. I don't know why no director or producer has ever sued him for causing multimillion-dollar cost over-runs and destroying the discipline on set.
I was never a Brando fan finding most of his films full of affectations and false notes. His work in "The Godfather" is overrated
Yet his performance in "On the Waterfront" almost makes up for all the crap he did.
I once heard that for one of his scenes in "Superman", he had his dialog written on Sarah Douglas'(Ursa) forehead so he could read his lines.
There was aslo a film he stared in with Matthew Broderick - "The Freshman" - That Brando torpedoed in an interview before it came out in theaters. Brando appologied to the interviewer and said the film sucks, and "this is my last film, and it seems I'm going out with a dog". The movie flopped. And it wasn't Brando's last film.
He was a good actor. But he's coasted on a good rep for a long time.
"And he doesn't seem to be hateful...Just misguided. I'll never forget his support of MLK when it wasn't chic."
Treu. And I've never heard him rally behind present day democratic platforms. He seemed to be an old school member of the "loyal opposition", rather than one of the present day hatemongers. His social activism was heartfelt, if not a little wierd sometimes (does anyone understand what he was talking about at the oscars?).
Fortunately he has enough friends in high places I doubt he will ever have to worry about losing his home.
The HORROR!
I always thought he sucked as an actor. Overplayed all his parts, and was an arrogant Butthole, but then, who cares?
(steely)
"Patricia Ruiz claims Michael Jackson, a longtime friend of Brando, offered to buy the island, but ran into difficulties before a deal could be signed."
Jacko wanted to set up his own magic kingdom for the children.
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