The Godfather Star Is One of 3 Actors Who Turned Down Their Oscar Wins
The 1973 Oscars ceremony was a bit of a mess when the award for Best Actor was received by someone else and not Marlon Brando himself.
Despite its renowned prestige, the Academy Award goes hand in hand with some of the most notorious scandals that ever shook Hollywood’s serene life.
Some of them reached another level when the Oscars ceremonies were left completely ignored by several most-awaited nominees and later on winners, and, surprisingly, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather has something to do with it too.
Back in 1973, the movie’s lead star, Marlon Brando, was nowhere to be found on the Oscars’ red carpet and eventually at the ceremony after he made it all official about his intention to protest the Academy for a reason. By doing so, Brando joined a short list of 2 other actors who also turned down their Oscar wins.
Marlon Brando Slammed Hollywood for Misrepresentation of Native Americans
The actor who helped Coppola reimagine the epic crime genre in the entire history of cinema, Marlon Brando was one of the most anticipated guests at the 1973 Oscar ceremony, also expected to win the prize for Best Actor, which he actually did.
However, Brando wasn’t in attendance that evening, and the crowd got even more shaken when actress Sacheen Littlefeather came up on stage to receive Brando’s statuette.
Taking the award on the actor’s behalf, Littlefeather gave a recap of Brando’s prepared speech, written for her in advance, in which he stated that he was boycotting Hollywood for its continuous negative portrayal of Native Americans.
Those who saw it happening had mixed feelings about the whole matter, and Littlefeather eventually confessed to having received numerous death threats after representing Brando at the Oscars.
Marlon Brando Followed the Suit of These 2 Other Actors
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Despite the Oscar decline being quite a rare occasion, Marlon Brando’s case is not the first and probably won’t be the last either.
All the way back in 1936, Dudley Nichols’s win in the Best Screenplay category marked the first time when someone didn’t receive the most desired award of the industry.
Nichols’ script for the 1935 drama thriller The Informer was eventually considered the best, though the writer himself didn’t show up, demonstrating his support for the Screen Writers Guild that had just started uniting Hollywood workers in their demand for better pay.
An even more peculiar situation is linked to the name of George C. Scott who won the Best Actor award for the Coppola-written epic war film Patton back in 1970 and never showed up to pick up the statuette, though his absence could’ve been easily predicted.
In fact, Scott expressed his intention not to attend the Oscars ceremony and even his desire not to be nominated at all in his telegram to the Academy as soon as he was announced as a nominee.
As the actor later explained in an interview with Time, he just wasn’t that much into the idea of praising the job of actors who mostly starred in movies rather than in theater plays. “You shoot scenes in order of convenience, not the way they come in the script, and that’s detrimental to a fully developed performance,” Scott stated.