The co-star who made Marlon Brando laugh so hard he couldn’t act: “He pleaded with me to go to my dressing room”
Brooding, intense, erratic, reclusive. Marlon Brando was many things, but a barrel of laughs wasn’t one of them. He rose to fame playing troubled, volatile young men like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and seven decades later, he is still the spirit animal of many male actors and disaffected youths.
But the Oscar-winning method actor wasn’t miserable all the time. Even he could lighten up on occasion, especially with the help of a man who made it his personal mission to make everyone chuckle. In the mid-1960s, Brando was at one of his many low points. He’d reached unparalleled levels of success and acclaim in his late 20s and early 30s and was struggling to find his identity as an actor again. He took a hands-off approach during this period, which led to some films that were far outside his usual territory.
One of them was Bedtime Story, a spirited little caper released in 1964 in which he and David Niven played warring conmen on the French Riviera who decide to let bygones be bygones and team up to entrap a wealthy heiress. It was later remade as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with Steve Martin and Michael Caine in the lead roles. In the original, the 40-year-old Brando played a crass American, while Niven, who was in his 50s at the time, played a refined Englishman masquerading as banished royalty.
Brando struggled mightily on the film, but not for the reasons you might think. The problem was that he was having too much fun hanging out with Niven to do his job. “I couldn’t act well on that picture because I was always breaking up,” he said. “Together, we wasted a lot of film.” Once, after he ruined several takes, Brando tried to prevent himself from cracking up by looking over Niven’s shoulder rather than directly at him. It didn’t work.
“Out of frustration, the director went to a close-up of David and put me off camera,” he recounted. “Even then, I couldn’t stop laughing, so he pleaded with me to go to my dressing room.” He did, and buried his face in a pillow, but they could still hear him laughing on set. All of this sounds a lot more entertaining than the actual film, which is decent, but not the sort of thing that’s going to make you wake up your neighbours with maniacal cackling.
Based on Brando’s experience, you might think that Niven was a stand-up comedian, but he often played dramatic roles. The British actor moved to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he became a successful star in movies like Wuthering Heights, Separate Tables (for which he earned an Oscar nomination), and A Matter of Life and Death. Later in his career, he was Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond, but the producers wanted someone with a little more danger and rugged youthfulness, and Niven was not even in the same ballpark.
Niven was also known, to use a modern phrase, as a good hang. He had a knack for conversation, just as all Americans hope British people with cut-glass accents will. Among his countless friends were Humphrey Bogart, Princess Margaret, and the American intellectual and political commentator William F Buckley Jr. Clearly, Brando was won over as well, even if he didn’t end up being part of Niven’s inner circle.
