Cinema 'Godfather' Brando dies broke

By RUPERT CORNWELL

WASHINGTON - Although Marlon Brando, eccentric and meticulous to the last, left precise taped details for his funeral - including, it is believed, instructions that his friend and protege Jack Nicholson should lead the mourners - it is not certain whether he left enough money to pay for it.

President George W. Bush hailed the departed star as one of the 20th century's greatest actors.

In his heyday, the man who won two best actor Oscars and whom many regarded as the greatest American actor of his age, was paid US$5 million for 10 minutes of screen time in a movie.

But when he died at the age of 80 in a Los Angeles hospital on Saturday from lung failure and heart problems, he was by all accounts living in virtual penury.

His home was a shabby one-bedroom bungalow in Beverly Hills.

By Brando's own admission, his income in his final years was "limited and sporadic".

A forthcoming biography, Brando in Twilight by Patricia Ruiz, claims he owed banks almost £11 million ($31.1 million).

So frightened was he of debt collectors, she writes, that he hid his Oscar statuette for the 1954 performance in On the Waterfront (he refused to accept the other one, for The Godfather in 1973, as an ill-received protest at Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans).

By the end, too, he was grossly overweight, a victim of the binge eating that plagued him in the second half of his life, his fridge chained shut by his nurses to prevent him wolfing down more food.

Yesterday, however, America remembered the other, earlier Marlon Brando, whose intense and mesmerisingly powerful roles made him a legend.

Within hours of the announcement of his death, tributes poured in from the Hollywood Establishment. "I was shocked and deeply saddened at the loss of the greatest acting genius of our time," said Al Pacino, Brando's co-star in The Godfather.

Thereafter, however, with the exception of Bernardo Bertolucci's compelling Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now , his career fizzled.

"He threw his career away," said Robert Tanitch, author of Brando. "He hated acting. He was rather ashamed of it. He didn't think there was such a thing as a great movie."

Brando's turbulent private life did not help, distracting him from acting and becoming the main cause of his financial woes. Brando had three wives and 11 acknowledged children. Some said there were others.

The dark years began in 1991, when eldest son Christian admitted shooting dead the fiance of his half-sister Cheyenne. Brando is reputed to have spent millions of dollars on lawyers for his son, who was jailed for five years.

Four years later Cheyenne, a drug addict, committed suicide, and her mother, Tarita Teriipia, the actor's third wife, did the same.

Last year he faced a £55 million lawsuit from his former housekeeper and lover Cristina Ruiz for the maintenance of their three children. Brando said he had no money.

But despite tragedies and failing health, Brando did not change.

A week before he died, a visitor described him as "his usual eccentric self, a little crazy".

- INDEPENDENT