France: The memoirs of Marlon Brando's Tahitian former wife hit bookshelves in France yesterday, lifting the lid on the secretive actor's troubled life and the suicide of their daughter Cheyenne.
Marlon, My Love, My Suffering, by Tarita Teriipaia, details the tortured 43-year relationship the pair struck up when Brando landed in Tahiti in late 1960 to film Mutiny on the Bounty, in which Teriipaia was cast as his love interest.
The Oscar-winning star of The Godfather and On the Waterfront, who died in July 2004 at the age of 80, is depicted as a volatile tyrant who could be physically and mentally cruel one moment, tenderly loving the next.
Teriipaia (63), told this week's edition of Paris Match magazine she had informed the actor she was writing her life story to get over the traumas of the past.
Born to a fisherman on the French Polynesian island of Bora Bora, the starlet was initially underwhelmed by Brando's advances on the set of Mutiny before succumbing during filming in Los Angeles.
She says Brando begged her to have his child but changed his mind when she became pregnant, urging her to have an abortion. She refused and the couple had a son, Teihotu, later followed by a daughter, Cheyenne. Brando was a regular visitor to Tahiti, buying an estate for Teriipaia and pouring millions into Tetiaroa, a South Seas atoll he bought in 1966, where his ashes are scattered.
He worshipped his daughter but when she began having violent fits he withdrew and consigned her to a series of psychiatric institutes. Christian Brando, his son by Welsh actress Anna Kashfi, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for the 1990 murder of Cheyenne's boyfriend. Cheyenne hanged herself in 1995 at the age of 25.
It was during a grief-management session that Brando finally told Teriipaia he loved her, decades after they first met. Though they lived thousands of miles apart and Brando had numerous affairs, he always loomed over her life, she said. - (Reuters)