How Brando slated Sophia Loren’s ‘dinosaur breath’
MARLON BRANDO triggered a lifelong feud with Sophia Loren by complaining the beautiful actress’s passion for Italian food made her breath smell ‘worse than a dinosaur’s’.
During their first on-screen kiss while shooting A Countess from Hong Kong in 1967, Loren furiously broke away from the Hollywood legend’s clutches to tell the film crew: ‘Do you know what he just whispered to me? That I have long hairs growing out of my nose.’
The enmity between the pair is disclosed in two books, published on the tenth anniversary of Brando’s death at the age of 80 on July 1, 2004.
Sophia Loren: a Biography, by Warren G. Harris, tells how the method actor offended Loren the first time he met her.
Walking into her dressing room on the Paramount lot, he glanced at her paintings and told her, ‘You’re sick. Emotionally disturbed. You should see a psychiatrist.’
Following the commotion of their first screen kiss, director Charlie Chaplin soothed Loren’s outrage and she reluctantly agreed to two more takes.
But on the third take, Brando bit Loren’s lip until she bled. In subsequent love scenes, according to Chaplin, ‘Each clasped the other as i f embracing a werewolf!’
The second book, a biography called Brando’s Smile, details how the star – who counted Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy among his conquests – was an ‘epic womaniser’ and ‘his need for sex was an addiction’.
‘It took up endless amounts of his time,’ author Susan Mizruchi wrote. ‘He wanted to be loved and needed women, but then he broke their hearts because he couldn’t be loyal.’