Brando had 'turned down' Godfather role
Marlon Brando repeatedly turned down his Oscar-winning role in The Godfather, it emerged today.
The actor said “It’s about the Mafia. I won’t glorify the Mafia,” his longtime friend Budd Schulberg told Vanity Fair magazine.
But Brando’s assistant Alice Marchak begged him to read the book hoping he would warm to the role, he said.
At one point he threw the book at her, Schulberg said, but the next time he saw her he had painted his face with a moustache and said, “How do I look?”
Marchak told him he looked like George Raft, an actor famed for playing gangsters on the silver screen.
Every time she went to see Brando from then on he was wearing a different gangster-style moustache, according to Schulberg.
Brando eventually took a screen test and won the role of Don Corleone in the adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel, securing himself an Oscar in 1973 which he famously refused.
At the glittering ceremony the actor sent a woman dressed in Native American costume onto the stage to highlight the plight of Native Americans.
Brando died last July aged 80. His Godfather co-stars James Caan and Robert Duvall are to lend their voices to a new video game version of the blockbuster.
Schulberg wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront which starred Brando in 1954.
