Rita Moreno Says She Once ‘Tried To End [Her] Life’ Because Of Her Relationship With Marlon Brando

One Day at a Time actress Rita Moreno revealed the dark side of her eight-year relationship with Godfather actor Marlon Brando on a recent Variety‘s Actors on Actors chat.

The EGOT winner, now 90, met Brando when she was just 22 on the set of Désirée in 1954. “Ultimately, it was exciting to be with Marlon,” Moreno told Jessica Chastain. “Oh, my God, it was exciting. He was extraordinary in many, many ways, but he was a bad guy.”

She continued, “He was a bad guy when it came to women. I was such a different person then. I had all the makings of a doormat.”

“I could read him like a book and that’s why he loved me, and that’s why he mistreated me in so many ways,” she added.

Moreno said the relationship was so bad that at one point she “tried to end her life with pills in his house.”

When Brando wanted to get back together with her in 1969, Moreno said, “I didn’t want that. But he did. He lost a big part of himself, I think. The good part of him, the good Marlon that Rita loved. It was very complicated. Really, really complicated.”