Rita Moreno Says Ex Marlon Brando Slapped Her So Hard She Saw Stars
Rita Moreno is one of the few celebrities from the Golden Age of Hollywood who’s still going strong. She’s also one of the few performers to have earned the prestigious EGOT series of awards. And in 2013, the star published her memoir, detailing her decades in entertainment. Over the years, Moreno has been open about some of her celebrity relationships, notably her intense romance with fellow film star Marlon Brando. In a 2021 interview, she revealed one incident with Brando that led the actor to slap her so hard she “saw stars.”
Rita Moreno and Marlon Brando embarked on a torrid love affair
Moreno was an up-and-coming young actor in 1954 when she was cast in the film Désirée opposite Brando. He was already a Hollywood icon, known for his intense method of inhabiting characters. Moreno and Brando had chemistry from the start, and she later detailed that she and the older star began an affair on the set of the film.
At the time, Moreno was only 22 years old. She became smitten with the charismatic Brando, writing in her memoir, “Just meeting him that first day sent my body temperature skyrocketing as though I had been dropped into a very hot bath, and I went into a full-body blush.”
But their relationship was far from simple. Moreno has said that although their romance lasted for nearly eight years, they often fought. Brando was never faithful, fathering children with other women while he was with Moreno.
What did Rita Moreno say about Marlon Brando slapping her so hard she ‘saw stars’?
In 1968, sometime after Rita Moreno had endured an abortion after becoming pregnant by Brando, the two stars shared the screen again. The film, The Night of the Following Day, was a crime drama that pitted Brando’s and Moreno’s characters against each other in intense situations. One scene required Moreno to slap Brando.
“I hauled off and slapped him in this scene … And to my absolute astonishment, he not only slapped me back; he slapped me back so hard I — I now understood what it meant when you said, ‘I saw stars,'” she revealed in a 2021 Associated Press interview.
They eventually made amends
Rita Moreno’s relationship with Marlon Brando might have been toxic, but the West Side Story star was powerless against her attraction to the Godfather actor for a long time.
“He was the king. He was a huge star like very few eras have seen actually, and he loved me. He was the daddy that I couldn’t please. I didn’t know that,” Moreno admitted in a documentary about her life. “I wasn’t aware of that at all, but he was the one I needed to please. He was the one I wanted to be married to.”
Eventually, Moreno and Brando ended their relationship for good. It took a few years, but the former couple eventually established a friendship that endured until Brando’s death.
Moreno told People in 2017 that she still keeps a photo of him in her home because the famed actor was the “lust of [her] life.” However, her husband, Leonard Gordon — to whom she was married for 45 years, from 1965 until his 2010 death — remains the true love of her life.
