Rita Moreno’s tempestuous relationship with Marlon Brando led to a suicide attempt.
The EGOT-winner opened up about how the hot and heavy romance with the late screen legend caused her to almost end up in an early grave.
“I tried to end my life with pills in his house,” she shared with actress Jessica Chastain during the latest installment of “Variety’s Actors on Actors” series.
“I didn’t understand that if I was going to kill this pathetic, sad, trod-upon Rita, the rest of Rita was also going to go with me,” she added. “I really didn’t seem to understand that. But that’s what the attempt was. It was an attempt.”
The 90-year-old actress, currently starring in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” met Brando on the set of the 1954 film “Desiree” when she was 22.
“Ultimately, it was exciting to be with Marlon,” she dished, “Oh, my God, it was exciting.”
“He was extraordinary in many, many ways, but he was a bad guy,” Moreno added about “The Godfather” icon. “He was a bad guy when it came to women. I was such a different person then. I had all the makings of a doormat.”
The Puerto Rican beauty, who won an Oscar for her role in the original “West Side Story” in 1961, said Brando lied to her throughout their nearly eight-year relationship.
But she was on to him the entire time.
“So whenever he lied, I would look at him and I’d say, ‘Marlon, look at me.’ And he’d start to grin this kind of — I don’t want to use the bad word — that poop-eating grin,” she revealed. “I could read him like a book and that’s why he loved me, and that’s why he mistreated me in so many ways.
The “On the Waterfront” star tried to rekindle their romance years later while they were filming 1969′s “The Night of the Following Day.”
But nothing materialized.
“What’s interesting is that he wanted to renew,” Moreno explained during the virtual chat. “I was now married. I had a beautiful child, Fernanda. He was ready to have a go again. I didn’t want that. But he did. He lost a big part of himself, I think. The good part of him, the good Marlon that Rita loved. It was very complicated. Really, really complicated.”
Brando died in 2004 at 80 years old.
Aside from his acclaimed screen performances, Brando was also known as a notorious womanizer who married multiple times and fathered 11 children.
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