Marlon Brando’s Real Last Tango: The Never-Told Story of His Secret A-List Acting School
The legendary actor showed up in drag at his 2001 acting workshop, and it only got weirder from there. THR talks to those who were present and learns what the world’s greatest actor taught Robin Williams, Michael Jackson, Sean Penn and more — and why Brando’s executor, Mike Medavoy, wants to keep the whole thing, filmed by director Tony Kaye, under wraps
This story first appeared in the June 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Some memories of the event — like the exact address of the warehouse in Hollywood where it took place — are a little hazy. It was, after all, 14 years ago. But nobody who was part of that extraordinary 10-day acting workshop ever will forget a single detail about Marlon Brando‘s entrance.
About 20 young acting students and a dozen established stars — including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos, Whoopi Goldberg and Harry Dean Stanton — had gathered to learn at the feet of the greatest thespian of the 20th century. He didn’t disappoint. When the doors flung open, the 78-year-old Brando appeared wearing a blond wig, blue mascara, a black gown with an orange scarf and a bodice stuffed with gigantic falsies. Waving a single rose in one hand, he sashayed through the warehouse, plunked his 300-pound frame onto a thronelike chair on a makeshift stage and began fussily applying lipstick.
“I am furious! Furious!” Brando told the group in a matronly English accent, launching into an improvised monologue that ended, 10 minutes later, with the actor turning around, lifting his gown and mooning the crowd.
And that, it turned out, would be one of the more decorous moments of “Lying for a Living,” the wild 10-day symposium — as much a 1960s– style “happening” as it was an acting course — that Brando organized and led in November 2001, less than three years before his death. The event is little recalled today — and even back then it slipped mostly under the radar — but those daylong classes, where movie stars mingled with midgets, Madonna‘s ex-boyfriend nearly caused a riot and an Osama bin Laden lookalike almost gave Jon Voight a coronary, was a never-to-be-repeated moment of Hollywood letting its freak flag fly.
It also featured some of the strangest, and some would say finest, performances of Brando’s later years.
During one of the sessions, a troupe of little people and a team of Samoan wrestlers — Brando somehow had wrangled all of them to the warehouse on the same day — did improvisation exercises together on the stage. Another time, Brando plucked a homeless man from a dumpster and brought him in for acting lessons. He had students strip naked in front of the entire class. (“The girls were shaking, like, ‘What the f— am I doing here?’ ” recalls Olmos. “But Brando had a reason for it. He always had a reason.”) While a jazz musician played Brando’s favorite tunes on a rented piano, Philippe Petit, the French tightrope walker who had crossed the Twin Towers, did stunts on a high-wire. Michael Jackson popped in for a class. Robin Williams attended all 10 days, at one point doing a 30-minute improv routine about haggling with a used-car salesman.
