10/07/2024
Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando and The Last Tango
Marlon didn't r**e Maria. He was never even accused. They were actually close friends until the day he died.
There is a r**e scene in Last Tango In Paris. On the day of shooting the scene the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, added the detail of Marlon's character using a stick of butter as lubricant. He wanted to make the actress uncomfortable, humiliated even, and use that energy in the scene, like a warped version of Hitchcock surprising Janet Leigh with cold water in the shower in Psycho.
Maria was young and working with legends and didn't know she could refuse them so, after protesting, eventually she went along with it. She later said that she felt "a little r**ed" by that abuse of power in their working relationship. Understandably so.
They filmed the scene with the stick of butter. There was no actual s*x happening, of course, it's a movie, they are actors.
But all that is more complicated and less juicy a story. So a cynical blogger took Maria's quote about feeling "a little r**ed" along with some Bertolucci quotes about not regretting how he treated her on set, and created an outrage piece about Marlon anally ra**ng Maria on film. Despite nobody ever once claiming that happened. And people believed it.
Maria and Marlon remained close friends all the way up to his death. Maria hated Bertolucci for a lot of reasons, none of which were "he had me r**ed for his movie" because that didn't happen. But people continue to parrot the story, it's the premise of the movie "Maria", which has some great performances by the actors but is not a truthful version of what happened.
Maria Schneider was certainly hurt by what happened, but it was acting, alongside one of the greatest actors on the planet, Marlon fxcking brando, Stanley Kowalski, Don Corleone and so many others, who ripped his own guts open in this film, which he called his most personal role.
So they were both actors and yeah, she took the money and the film made her world famous. I met her on the casting of "Double Life of Véronique", where the legendary casting director Margot Capelier, had invited her, and she told us a story about meeting the Mime Marceau one day on the streets of Paris. She llooked like a women who had suffered from drugs and depression, a shadow of her former beauty, but she was very charming and warm. I also later found out that she had directed a film adapted from Stefan Zweig, in which a friend, actor Serge Renko, played the main part.
I don"t hink the "butter scene" destroyed the young actress psyche, or even her reputation as an actress; this role, and the one in Antonioni's "Profession: Reporter" (where Antionioni manipulated Nicholson into a real fit of rage for the scene where his car breaks down in the desert by forcing him to repeat the scene multiple times), made her an icon o cinema.
A broken icon.
Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando, Last Tango in Paris, 1972
Author of the Photo unknown, cinematography by Vittorio Storare
