“I started to fume”: the most embarrassing moment of Marlon Brando’s career
In 1966, Marlon Brando‘s instincts about his acting ability were severely tested. This was the year he was offered a lead role in what would prove to be Charlie Chaplin’s final directorial effort, and he immediately wanted to be involved because he thought of the iconic silent era star as a comedic genius. However, the movie, A Countess from Hong Kong, was a romantic comedy, and Brando wasn’t sure if he had the comic chops to do it justice.
You see, as the best actor of his generation and a pioneer of modern dramatic acting, Brando was a Hollywood superstar par excellence. However, audiences were used to seeing him in intense, soul-baring parts in stirring movies like On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, and Brando had become accustomed to those kinds of performances, too. He was a lot of things in ’66, but funny wasn’t one of them, at least not intentionally so. Therefore, the idea of tackling a completely different screen discipline gave him cold feet, and he even told Chaplin he thought he was wrong for the role.
“I’ve always been leery of comedies,” Brando wrote in his memoir Songs My Mother Taught Me. “But he insisted that I could do it, and since I regarded him as a genius, I agreed to be a marionette in his hands. I figured he must know something I didn’t, that he thought I could add something to the picture not apparent to me, and that I could help him achieve it.”
Perhaps if Brando had known Chaplin tried to secure Rex Harrison and Cary Grant to play the lead role of American diplomat Ogden before turning to him, he’d have been less inclined to sign up without reading a script. However, his reverence for Chaplin won out, and he committed to the picture. Unfortunately, though, being unsure about his comic sensibilities turned out to be the least of Brando’s problems, because he declared Chaplin “fearsomely cruel” and “the most sadistic man I’d ever met.”
Brando arrived on the set of A Countess from Hong Kong expecting Chaplin to be the beloved funnyman he remembered from his youth. Instead, he claimed the Great Dictator star, who was in his late ’70s by that point, lived up to that moniker. He dubbed him “an egotistical tyrant and a penny-pincher” and claimed Chaplin regularly mistreated his son, Sydney, who had a supporting role in the film.
To Brando’s shock and horror, though, his worst day working on the film came when he was 15 minutes tardy one morning. He acknowledged, “I was in the wrong and I shouldn’t have been late,” but what happened next was the most embarrassing incident he’d ever been put through on a movie set.
“In front of the whole cast, Chaplin berated me, embarrassing me, telling me that I had no sense of professional ethics and that I was a disgrace to my profession,” Brando alleged. “As he went on and on, I started to fume.”
Rather than let Chaplin continue to lambast him in front of the assembled throng of silent cast and crew members, an incensed Brando decided to put a stop to his ranting and raving. He said through gritted teeth, “Mr Chaplin, I’ll be in my dressing room for 20 minutes. If you give me an apology within that time, I will consider not getting on a plane and returning to the United States. But I’ll be there only 20 minutes.” Then, he strode off stage to begin stewing in anger and resentment in his dressing room.
Ultimately, Chaplin did seek him out and apologise, and they finished making the movie, but the damage was already done. Brando’s eyes had been opened to the fact that “the greatest genius that the medium has ever produced was a mixed bag, just like all of us,” and that was something he’d never forget.
