Iconic actor Marlon Brando had probably the most bizarre eating habits out of any celebrity I can think of. Marlon Brando was a binge eater, a habit which led to him to infamously balloon in weight towards the later stages of his life. His ever-expanding waistline also seemed to coincide with augmented depression following an event in 1990 where his eldest son, Christian Brando shot dead his sisters boyfriend after discovering that her boyfriend had been beating her.
However, Brando’s incessant gluttony had been a character defect which he had been carrying all throughout his adulthood. In the film ‘The Men’ (1950), where Brando made his debut, fellow actor Richard Erdman says that Marlon’s diet consisted of “junk food, take out, and peanut butter” which he ‘consumed by the jarful’, according to Eddie Deezen. It was subsequently rumoured that Brando was consuming around five to seven thousand calories a day by the time of his next and potentially most iconic role, ‘Streetcar Named Desire’ (1951)
This may come as a suprise to many, given that around this time Marlon boasted one of the most perfectly-looking, muscular figures in Hollywood. At a time where the gym was nowhere near as popular as it is today, Brando’s muscular yet slender look was somewhat unprecedented. The benefits of youth and rigorous exercise routines helped offset Brando’s bizarre eating habits. However, naturally as Brando got older, it became more and more difficult to keep the weight off. By the early sixties, due to his filling figure, Brando had started going on extreme crash diets (which he rarely adhered to), and purging. On the set of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ in 1962, James Taylor claims that Brando split 52 pairs of trousers during filming, due to his wild swings in weight.
However, it was on the 1979 film set “Apocalypse Now” where Brando weight problems really started to become evident. In order to play the role of Colonel Kurtz, who in Joseph Conrad’s book ‘Hearts of Darkness’ was described as ‘gaunt, with his flesh consumed by the jungle’, Brando promised to director Francis Ford Coppola he would lose weight. When Brando subsequently showed up to set hideously out of shape, therefore, Coppola had to resort to shooting Brando in dark lighting with flattering camera angles in order to diminish how evident his weight gain was.
Towards the latter stages of his life, his waistline continued to expand further, ballooning up to 350 pounds by the turn of the 90’s, despite efforts from others in order to help him lose weight. One of his girlfriends actually tried to lock his fridge at night in order to prevent his constant ‘snacking’. Despite her efforts, in the morning she found that Marlon had used a crowbar to unlock the fridge and had taken a bite out of a huge wheel of cheese inside. Brando died at 80 in 2004, due to the damage he had done to his liver and heart throughout the years. Its actually impressive he managed to live that long in all honesty. In summary, Brando certainly boasts the strangest eating habits of any celebrity in history. Rest in peace, Marlon.