A script of The Godfather annotated by Marlon Brando sold for a record US$312,800 at an auction of the late screen legend's personal effects at Christie's in New York.
The script of the 1972 classic, which won Brando a second best-actor Oscar for his portrayal of mafia kingpin Don Corleone, was the highlight of the sale, and attracted heavy bidding from the outset.
The lot was finally snapped up by a telephone bidder for more than 20 times its high estimate of US$15,000, setting a new world auction record for a script.
PHOTO: AP
The previous best was the US$244,000 paid for Clark Gable's Gone With the Wind script in 1996.
A handwritten letter from the creator of The Godfather, Mario Puzo, urging Brando to take the role of Don Corleone, also attracted strong bidding and finally sold for US$132,000, way above the Christie's high estimate of US$1,200.
"Dear Mr Brando, I wrote a book called The Godfather which has had some success and I think you're the only actor who can play the part," the signed letter began.
"I know this was presumptuous of me but the best I can do by the book is try. I really think you'd be tremendous," Puzo wrote.
The property going under the hammer Thursday comprised nearly 330 lots, most of them from the Los Angeles home where the increasingly reclusive actor lived from 1960 until his death in July 2004.
Christie's had promoted the auction as providing an intimate insight into the lifestyle of "an extremely private and elusive individual."
As well as souvenirs from Brando's lengthy screen career, many lots featured Brando's correspondence, both letters and telegrams, with fellow 20th-century icons like Marilyn Monroe and civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, who wrote in 1959 asking for Brando's support in the fight to integrate US schools.
The King letter sold for US$13,200. Among the stranger items was a table football set that brought in US$5,400.
The run up to the auction had not been a smooth one with Brando's son Christian, 47, reportedly furious at the way Brando's estate has handled the sale.
Christian's lawyer, Theresa Bingham, said her client believed many of the lots in the auction were items that the actor would never have wanted sold.
Bingham specifically demanded that Christie's pull lot 150 -- a 14 carat gold Saint Christopher's medallion that Christian's mother, Anna Kashfi, had given her son.
The auction house confirmed before the sale that the heirloom had been returned.
Brando, who was married and divorced three times, had 11 children with his three wives and several other women, including his Guatemalan housekeeper.
Brando, who died last year of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 80, revolutionized post World War II acting with his "method" portrayals of moody and raw but touching characters in films like Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Wild One (1953).
Despite his huge talent and global acclaim, many felt Brando never achieved his potential as an actor, preferring in his later life to dodge the spotlight and work only when he needed the cash, whatever the artistic merit of the film.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS