Marlon Brando's cheating drove Rita Moreno to attempt suicide
'I tried to kill myself out of self-hatred': How Marlon Brando's serial cheating drove Rita Moreno to attempt suicide years before she became Hollywood royalty with EGOT win
Marlon Brando's insatiable s-xual appetite and serial cheating not only tore apart his relationship with one of Hollywood's most famous stars, but also drove her to attempt suicide.
Rita Moreno is opening up about her tempestuous romance with Brando in a shocking and revealing new interview with Closer, from the moment she met him on the set of the 1954 film Désirée at the age of 22 to the day eight years later when she tried to overdose on pills at his home.
Moreno was unsuccessful in her attempt, and would eventually end things with her co-star before going on to have one of the most famed show business careers of all time, making history in 1977 when she became just the third person to EGOT by winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.
She won the first of those awards, her Oscar for playing Anita in West Side Story, shortly after she split from Brando.
'Our sensual life was unbelievable,' Moreno said of meeting the actor, who at the time had recently become a household name thanks to his breakout performance in A Streetcar Named Desire.
The romance burned hot at first between the two actors, but so too it seems did Brando's desire for other women.
'We were obsessed with each other, but I couldn’t take the humiliation of him being with other women. I tried to kill myself,' said Moreno.
She goes on to say; 'I tried to kill myself out of self-hatred, because I was like, "How could you allow yourself to let somebody treat you so badly."
'I took pills he had in his house, and I almost succeeded.'
Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi was also interviewed by the magazine, and said of first meeting her future husband; 'He looked at me with an intensity that made me feel weak.'
Once again however, he could not stay faithful according to Kashfi, despite the fact that they were recently married and had a newborn child.
'In a little less than a year, he was cheating on me,' said Kashfi.
'He was a man of vast s-xual appetites that couldn’t be contained.'
The couple divorced in 1959 two years after they first married. The actor then married again the following year.
Brando and Moreno's eight-year relationship also overlapped with both of these marriages.
Moreno went in to further detail about her relationship with Brando in her 2013 biography Rita Moreno, writing; 'We were locked in the ultimate folie à deux, a crazy love that lasted for years, until one day I quite literally was forced out of a coma and had to choose life over him.'
As for his insatiable appetite for s-x, Moreno said in the book; 'To say that he was a great lover - sensual, generous, delightfully inventive - would be gravely understating what he did not only to my body, but for my soul.
'Every aspect of being with Marlon was thrilling, because he was more engaged in the world than anyone else I’d ever known.'
The suicide attempt came at a particularly difficult time for Moreno, who was also dealing with having recently undergone a botched abortion to get rid of Brando's baby.
The pregnancy had been terminated but the fetus had not been removed, which resulted in massive bleeding and required a trip to the hospital to fix what had gone wrong during the illegal operation.
Moreno wrote that Brando seemed unconcerned with her well being, and even at one point demanded his money back for the bungled procedure.
He then took off to shoot a new film, Mutiny on the Bounty, and fell in love with his costar Tarita Teriipia.
At that point Moreno decided to take all the sleeping pills in Brando's cabinet and end it all, but had her plan foiled when his assistant came in to check on her and rushed her to the hospital to have her stomach pumped when he realized what she had done.
This was just after she had finished shooting West Side Story.
Moreno said in her book that a therapist eventually told her and Brando to stop seeing one another and they agreed, with Brando eventually marrying Teriipia, who became his third wife.
Acting wise he would go on to appear in Superman, The Godfather and Roots. He would also win a second Oscar and his first Emmy, though he never came close to achieving EGOT status like his ex before passing away in 2004 at the age of 80 from respiratory problems.
As for Moreno, the Puerto Rican girl born Rosa Dolores Alverío would not only get her EGOT but also a slew of other honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the National Medal of Arts and, just last year, a Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award from The Kennedy Center Honors.
She married cardiologist Leonard Gordon in 1965 and the two stayed together until his death five years ago.
At 84-years-old she is still acting in both film and television, most recently appearing alongside Gena Rowlands and Jacki Weaver in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.
