Marlon Brando burst onto the silver screen in the early 1950s, with career-defining roles in dramas like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Off-screen, however, his private life was just as dramatic.
Brando married three times in his life, first to British-Indian actress Anna Kashfi in 1957; then to American actress Movita Castaneda in 1960; and lastly to Tarita Teriipaia, a French Polynesian actress Brando met while filming Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962. He also had numerous affairs and romances (including an infamous clandestine relationship with Marilyn Monroe), plus had 11 children. Yet despite all that, rumors about Brando’s sexuality dogged him for years, leaving gossip columnists and biographers to speculate that Brando was—or had at one time been—bisexual.
Those rumors would likely have continued to have dogged him for the rest of his life if Brando hadn’t quietly and unexpectedly confirmed them as true in a little-known interview in the 1970s.
While publicizing his latest movie, The Missouri Breaks, in 1976, Brando was asked by a French interviewer what he thought about rumors that he and his co-star Jack Nicholson were in a secret relationship. Brando coolly and openly replied, “Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences … 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.”
Some Hollywood rumors, it seems, can end up being entirely true.