Brando Cremated in Private Service in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Acting great Marlon Brando was cremated in a private funeral attended only by family and cloaked in the kind of secrecy that shrouded the last years of his life, his lawyer said on Tuesday.
The service, which relatives managed to keep under wraps until a day after the fact, was held in Los Angeles on Monday, said Seattle-area attorney David Seeley, who represented Brando and his business interests for the past four years.
Seeley said he was not privy to details of the ceremony and knew of no plans for a public memorial service.
“All I can tell you is … anything that’s going to occur in the future is a private family matter,” Seeley told Reuters. “They’re keeping it under a closed, need-to-know basis.”
The actor’s older sister, former actress Jocelyn Brando, was quoted by Foxnews.com columnist Roger Friedman as saying, “There will be no service of any kind.”
She added: “If someone wants to do something, that’s their business. But Marlon would have hated it. He would not have liked it, and we don’t want to do anything he didn’t want to do. He’s off on his trip, whatever that is.”
The low-key aftermath of Brando’s death was in keeping with his intensely private nature late in life after a celebrated, half-century career in such memorable films as “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront” and “The Godfather.”
Seeley also dismissed widely circulated media reports that the enigmatic actor, who died last Thursday at age 80, had left behind precise, taped instructions for how he wanted to be memorialized.
According to accounts in the British press, the two-time Oscar winner had requested that a final service be led by his friend and neighbor, Jack Nicholson, that certain people not be invited and that his ashes be scattered over the Tahitian atoll he bought in 1966.
“None of that is true as far as I’m aware,” Seeley said. “He left a will that’s going to be probated, and that’s the document that’s going to control how everything gets distributed.”
Seeley said that Brando was not married at the time of his death, and that he had nine children, including those he adopted and his deceased daughter, Cheyenne, who committed suicide in 1995.
A spokeswoman for UCLA Medical Center said last week that the performer had died of lung failure. His sister told Foxnews.com that Brando had suffered from the chronic lung ailment pulmonary fibrosis.
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