Marlon Brando’s List of Lovers, & Why This Person Was the Love of His Life

Marlon Brando Jr. was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1924. His father, Marlon Brando Sr., was a traveling salesman — while his mother, Dorothy Pennebaker, was a stage actress. Both parents had substance issues and often left Marlon with the family’s housekeeper. He was terrified of his father, who used to get physical with him.

Marlon combatted his traumatic childhood, making people laugh by mimicking them. He became a notorious prankster, and he and his best friend, Wally Cox, caused mayhem in their neighborhood.

Excelling at sports and drama, the 18-year-old studied Stanislavski’s method acting in New York. Marlon played Stanley Kowalski in Tennesse Williams’ stage play A Streetcar Named Desire and went on to star in the film adaptation. Then, he made iconic movies like On the Waterfront and The Wild One.

Later in life, he ballooned in weight, became a Civil Rights activist, played The Godfather’s Don Corleone, earned $19 million for 20 minutes screen-time as Superman’s dad, and went off reservation as Colonel Kutz in Apocalypse Now.

Even as a young actor, Marlon Brando was a ladies’ man, but he also had secret flings with men. During his 1947 Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire, he had an affair with co-star Sandy Campbell.

Here’s Sandy on the right with his long-time partner, novelist Donald Windham. Writer Truman Capote spilled the beans, “I asked Marlon, and he owned up to it. He said he had lots of male lovers but didn’t see himself as gay. He figured everyone was just so drawn to him.”

Marlon met his match in the fiery Shelley Winters back in 1951. The actress had affairs with Errol Flynn, Sean Connery, Laurence Olivier, William Holden, and Burt Lancaster. In her 1980 memoir, Winters admitted she and Brando were “friends with benefits” when they were struggling young actors in New York.

Winters also shared a hilarious memory of Brando, who once dashed naked through her apartment building to throw photos of her boyfriend, Burt Lancaster, into the incinerator!

After dating actress Ariane “Pat” Quinn, Brando met English theater actor John Gielgud while making Julius Caesar in 1952. Brando played Mark Antony, while Gielgud played Cassius. The English luvvie took the young man under his wing and helped him blossom.

Brando reportedly performed “favors” for Gielgud, and he told his friends, “I owed it to him because he really helped me with lines.” In 1953, the same year he became Sir John Gielgud, the English actor was arrested for crimes in a London public lavatory.

Gielgud wasn’t the only English “luvvie” theater actor Brando bedded. Again, in the early 1950s, Marlon allegedly had a tryst with English Shakespearean actor and director Sir Laurence Olivier. They met when Brando appeared opposite Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh.

She played southern belle Blanche DuBois in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire. Years later, Francis Ford Coppola considered casting Sir Laurence Olivier as Don Corleone in The Godfather but eventually gave the part to Brando.

Not content with bedding her husband, Brando also had an affair with his Streetcar co-star Vivien Leigh. While the on-screen sparks between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois flew, they also ignited in real life!

Brando kept their union under wraps because, while Vivien had been diagnosed with bipolar, the cause of her many woes was probably down to her husband being a monster. Brando probably didn’t want to come to blows or have a swordfight with the man who played Prince Hamlet!

When Brando saw Katy Jurado opposite Gary Cooper in the iconic Western High Noon (1952), he fell for the Mexican actress. Marlon soon met his crush when he was filming Viva Zapata! in Mexico later the same year. Brando told screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz he loved “her enigmatic eyes, black as hell, pointing at you like fiery arrows.”

Marlon and Katy conducted an on-and-off affair throughout the decade. When Brando directed her in his first and only (disastrous) directorial effort, 1961’s One-Eyed Jacks, they rekindled their relationship.

Next up, Brando appeared in The Wild One. He played Johnny Strabler, the iconic leader of the motorbike gang who went up against Lee Marvin’s own biker gang, The Beetles — who gave The Beatles their name! While Brando was defining 1950’s counterculture, he dated Japanese-American actress and dancer Reiko Sato.

Renowned journalist Dorothy Kilgallen was the first to report that Brando and Sato were an item in 1954. Marlon and Reiko’s relationship swiftly cooled off, but they remained lifelong friends.

Like Brando, method actor Montgomery Clift also got around, dating many of Hollywood’s most famous men and women while remaining in the closet. Monty had affairs with Marlon’s ex-flame Sandy Campbell, Paul Newman, Roddy McDowall, writer Truman Capote, West Side Story choreographer Jerome Robbins, and Paramount Studios president Barney Balaban.

Brando idolized Clift, and the pair are rumored to have had a relationship in the 1950s before starring together in the World War II epic The Young Lions.

Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe are rumored to have had a sizzling decade-long affair. In his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon confessed, “We had an affair and saw each other on and off for years.”

In another juicy chapter, he recalled turning down Marilyn’s invitation for dinner just a few days before she passed away. Brando was adamant Marilyn was bumped off due to her affairs with both Kennedy brothers and their murky connections to the Mafia, CIA, and FBI.

Tab Hunter was one of Hollywood’s first heartthrobs. The bleach-blond hunk appeared in movies, released a number-one hit single called “Young Love”, and adorned hundreds of magazine covers and thousands of young girls’ bedroom walls. But Tab had a secret.

He was gay, and rumors say he and Marlon Brando got together sometime in the 1950s. Tab went on to have a long relationship with Psycho actor Anthony Perkins. He eventually came out of the closet in his 2005 autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.

Now, Tab Hunter was represented by Hollywood agent Henry Willson, the same man who represented Rock Hudson. Henry famously kept Hunter and Hudson’s secret lives out of the headlines for years.

Wilson even concocted a sham marriage between Rock Hudson and his own secretary, Phyllis Gates, to keep gossip magazines like Confidential off the scent. Brando is rumored to have slept with Rock in the 1950s. Hudson was the first famous Hollywood actor to succumb to AIDS, losing his life in 1985.

English steamy novelist Jackie Collins says she had a passionate liaison with Brando in 1952 when she was just 16. Jackie wrote, “We had a very brief but fabulous affair; he was at the height of his fame and glamour, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.”

Jackie continued — “We went together on and off for a short while, but he was a real womanizer and had a girlfriend, and I had another boyfriend, so it was just a bit of fun.”

Jackie’s more famous sister, actress Joan Collins, also confessed to sleeping with Brando in 1959. Known for her beauty (think a poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor), Joan starred in England’s first X-certificate drama, Cosh Boy (1953), and director Howard Hawks chose her to star as Princess Nellifer in Land of the Pharaohs the following year.

In an interview on BBC One’s The Graham Norton Show, Joan told a hilarious story about how she used to catch Marlon Brando raiding her fridge for ice cream!

After dating African-American actress, singer, and activist Diahann Carol, Brando is said to have had a sordid, toxic affair with James Dean. The Rebel Without a Cause actor was helplessly, unrequitedly in love with Marlon.

But Brando exploited Dean for his own amusement in a sadistic game of cat and mouse… or narcissist and codependent. When Marlon wasn’t physically hurting Jimmy Dean, he forced the young star to watch him sleep with other people, making him wait his turn standing outside his apartment.

30-year-old Brando met 22-year-old, Puerto Rican-born future West Side Story star Rita Moreno in 1954. They met while making Désirée when Brando starred as Napoleon Bonaparte and stayed together for eight years.

Rita wrote — “Just meeting him that first day sent my body temperature skyrocketing as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath, and I went into a full-body blush.” Well aware of Brando’s affairs, Rita started seeing Elvis Presley and Dennis Hopper to make him jealous.

In 1954, Brando gave a tour de force performance in On the Waterfront. During filming, he had a passionate romance with his co-star, the beautiful Eva Marie Saint. The stunning blonde actress played prizefighter Terry Malloy’s love interest, Edie Doyle. Terry famously coulda been a contender…

Brando could have had real class by sticking with Eva Marie Saint, but instead, he went and got himself engaged… to a French fisherman’s daughter!

After his career-defining performance in Elia Kazan’s masterpiece, Brando became engaged to 19-year-old French actress and fisherman’s daughter Josanne Mariani.

They met at a party, and she recalled, “Marlon suddenly came up to me and asked me to dance. I recognized him but knew nothing about him — including his previous love affairs. I’ve never been inclined to ask questions.” Marlon and his fiancée called things off the following year, probably because she found out Brando was having a slew of affairs.

While engaged to Josanne Mariani, Brando had a dalliance with another beautiful blonde actress, Grace Kelly. Unlike Katy Jurado, he didn’t fall for Grace Kelly when watching High Noon. Instead, she had a reputation for falling in love with and sleeping with many of her co-stars.

They met at a party and had a short, casual fling. Aged 26, Kelly gave up acting to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, becoming Princess Grace of Monaco. Tragically, she passed away after a car crash in 1982, aged 52.

Italian actress Rossana Rory was yet another blonde bombshell who fell under Brando’s spell. She and Marlon only had a very brief thing together, dating only for a couple of months between September and November 1955. As such, not much is known about their relationship.

Born in Rome in 1927, Rossana Rory went on to star as Norma in the comedy film Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958). She lived to the grand old age of 92 and passed away in 2020.

Around this time, Marlon claims he slept with one of the most famous stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich. Born in 1901, The Blue Angel actress would have been in her mid-to-late 50s while Brando was 23 years her junior.

Madonna sings about Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and Jimmy Dean in her 1990 hit “Vogue”, so maybe Marlon’s ticking off Her Madgesty’s list of superstars. The song also mentions Marlon Brando, and he’d have slept with himself if he could!

English actor Cary Grant emigrated to America to seek his fame and fortune. But by the time he allegedly hooked up with Brando in the 1950s, he was the star of several Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, like North by Northwest.

Author Darwin Porter wrote in his 2005 book Brando Unzipped, “Marlon had a bit of a fling with Cary Grant, spending a weekend with him in San Francisco.” The book went on to say, “Cary was also pursuing the actor Stewart Granger, who became another of Marlon’s conquests.”

Brando broke off his engagement with Josanne Mariani when he got actress Anna Kashfi pregnant. She was born Joan O’Callaghan in British colonial India to a Welsh mother and an Anglo-Irish father who worked on the Indian Railways.

The family moved to Cardiff, Wales when Joan was 13. But when she was 22, Joan transformed herself into the alluring Indian actress Anna Kashfi. Brando always had a thing for the exotic and was mesmerized by Anna’s dark good looks.

Brando made Anna Kashfi his first wife in 1957, and they had a son, Christian Devi Brando, the following year. True to form, the relationship soon soured, and they divorced before Christian was a year old.

A long and traumatic fight for custody of Christian ensued, and Anna even paid men $10,000 to kidnap her son and bring him to California. In 1990, Christian took Dag Drollet’s life, the boyfriend of his half-sister (and Marlon’s daughter), Cheyenne. Christian passed away from pneumonia in 2008, aged 49.

Marlon broke off his engagement to Josanne Mariani because he discovered he got Anna Kashfi pregnant. But he could equally have gotten one of his many other girlfriends pregnant as he was also fooling around with several other women at the time.

One of them was sultry, smoky-voiced American actress Virginia Leith, whom he dated from March to July 1956. Virginia had just had an affair with her A Kiss Before Dying co-star Jeffrey Hunter… while he was divorcing actress Barbara Rush. What a wild, merry, incestuous web!

In 1960, Brando married Mexican-American actress Movita Castaneda, aka just Movita. They had a son and a daughter together, Miko Castaneda Brando, born in 1961, and Rebecca Brando, born in 1966.

If you thought Barando was settling down, he still carried on with girlfriends like Roberta Haynes. He even married another woman while married to Movita! Ironically, Marlon and Movita’s marriage was annulled in 1968 because Movita was still married to Irish boxer, actor, and singer Jack Doyle.

In 1960, while married to Movita, Marlon had an affair with beautiful French-Vietnamese actress France Nuyen. She’d recently starred in the hugely popular movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific.

Like many of Brando’s conquests, France Nuyen had suffered terrible childhood trauma. She later said of her relationship with Marlon, “He just wanted an excuse to be a big little boy and dress up and be someone else and see how long he could fool everybody.”

Also in 1960, Brando flew to Tahiti to play Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty. There, he fell for 20-year-old actress Tarita Teriipaia’s tropical charms. Half French Polynesian and half Chinese, stunning Tarita became Brando’s third wife in 1962. Brando fell in love with Tahiti and bought a resort.

They were together for nine years, having two children, Simon Teihotu and Tarita Cheyenne, before divorcing in 1972 — the year Marlon played Don Corleone in The Godfather. Tragically, Cheyenne took her own life in Tahiti in 1995.

In the early 1960s, Marlon had a brief love affair with gorgeous African-American and Cherokee actress and singer Eartha Kitt. Best known for her Christmas song “Santa Baby” and playing Catwoman in the 1960s Batman TV show, genius actor and director Orson Welles once called Kitt the “most exciting woman in the world.”

Of course, Marlon Brando seduced the famous seductress. But their relationship didn’t last because he jumped into bed with one of the most famous women in the world…

If sleeping with President John F. Kennedy’s mistress, Marilyn Monroe, wasn’t enough, Brando also had a brief rendezvous with his widow, Jackie Kennedy. Marlon confessed he spent two nights with Jackie in 1964 after she chased him at a dinner.

That’s less than a year after JFK was assassinated. In Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, author C. David Heymann quoted Brando as saying Jackie “popped the magic question. ‘Would you like to spend the night?’ And I said, ‘I thought you’d never ask!'”

After flings with actresses Valerie Varda, Cynthia Lynn, and ​​Patricia Quinn, Brando finally settled down. In 1968, he began a long, rollercoaster relationship with actress Jill Banner. However, during the 1970s, Marlon started gaining weight and lost his good looks.

By the time he played Superman’s Kryptonian father, Jor-El, and Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now in the late ‘70s, his appetite for food had replaced his passion for lovemaking. Tragically, Jill Banner lost her life in a car wreck in 1982.

By the late 1980s, reclusive Marlon’s overeating had made him the size of a small house. In ‘88, he began a long relationship with his maid, Maria Cristina Ruiz. They had three children together — Ninna Priscilla Brando, Myles Jonathan Brando, and Timothy Gahan Brando.

When Brando stopped paying child support, Maria sued him for $100 million. In total, Marlon fathered 11 children with five women and adopted three more. However, Brando could have fathered many more children, and rumors say Courtney Love’s mom is one of them!

After having three children with his maid, Courtney Love’s most likely granddad settled down with French actor, director, and screenwriter Christian Marquand in 1994. They’d been friends and lovers for decades, and Brando named his first son after Marquand.

They lived together in France until Marquand passed away in 2000. Brando told a French journalist in 1976, “Homosexuality is so much in fashion, it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed.”

By the mid-1990s, Brando was enormous, but he still had one last conquest in him. Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss confessed to a week-long fling with Brando before she went to jail for tax evasion. Heidi described Brando as the sexiest, fattest man I ever slept with!”

Fleiss also said, “We had the most exhausting but satisfying eight hours of my life. He was old then, but Marlon knew exactly how to please a woman and, despite his size, had incredible stamina. He just kept going.”

In 2018, Vulture magazine interviewed composer and musician Quincy Jones, and he broke the internet. When the interviewer asked Quincy about Brazilian music, he replied — “Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his a** off. He was the most charming mother****** you ever met. He’d f*** anything. Anything! He’d f*** a mailbox.”

If that wasn’t shocking enough, Quincy Jones then named three very famous men he was certain Brando slept with. The first was comedian and Superman III actor Richard Pryor.

Now, Quincy Jones is known for being a colorful and controversial character. But if you’re doubting the veracity of his claims, let it be known that Quincy was one of the heavyweight actor’s best friends. At one point, Jones even lived on one of Brando’s islands in Tahiti.

Quincy swears that during one of his many stays in Tahiti, Brando opened up and confessed he’d once had an affair with soul singer Marvin Gaye. Sadly, Marvin Gaye’s father took his son’s life in 1984.

In Quincy Jones’ jaw-dropping Vulture exposé, he also stated Brando had an affair with Civil Rights activist, writer, playwright, and poet James Baldwin. They first met as struggling artists in New York in the 1940s.

They roomed together and remained close friends for the next 30 years. James Baldwin inspired Brando to become a Civil Rights activist. In 1973, Marlon sent Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather to collect his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather. So, what made Marlon Brando such a lothario?

As a boy, Marlon was obsessed with his Danish-Indonesian housekeeper, Ermi, who often slept naked beside him. Brando confessed, “She was all mine; she belonged to me and me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married.”

When Ermi left, Marlon was heartbroken. He wrote — “From that day forward, I became estranged from the world. I spent most of the rest of my life trying to find her.” Ermi’s good looks forever shaped the Wild One’s taste for Asian and Latina brunettes.

Through Brando’s many conquests, his closest relationship was always with his childhood friend, actor, and comedian Wally Cox (pictured, middle). When Wally passed away in 1973, Marlon kept his ashes and talked to the urn every night. When Brando passed away in 2004, he had their ashes mixed together.

Writer Beauregard Houston-Montgomery said Brando confided Cox was the love of his life. Marlon told another journalist — “If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him, and we would have lived happily ever after.”