Early Life
Christian Brando was named after French film director Christian Marquand who later directed Marlon in the film Candy. Christian was born in Los Angeles, California on May 11, 1958, the product of an affair between Marlon Brando and Anna Kashfi, an actress. Marlon and Kashfi met in 1955, and Kashfi became pregnant in 1957. They married in 1958 and divorced one year later.
Christian was shuttled between his mother and father. His parents became increasingly hostile towards one another, and engaged in a protracted custody battle. Marlon eventually won custody of Christian, who was then 13 years old.
Marlon was a distant father and spent little time with young Christian, who was raised by nannies and servants. Christian moved between Hollywood and Tetiaroa, his father's private island near Tahiti. Marlon continued to have relationships with multiple women by whom he fathered numerous children. Years later, while commenting on his childhood, Christian said that: "The family kept changing shape, I'd sit down at the breakfast table and say, 'Who are you?"
In 1972, while his father was abroad filming Last Tango in Paris, Christian was kidnapped by a gang of Anna Kashfi's hippie friends, to whom she had apparently promised to pay $10,000. When she refused to pay they took the boy to Mexico, where a posse of private detectives hired by Brando, from an agency named "The Investigators", led by private investigator Jay J. Armes, rescued him late one night and returned him to Los Angeles. Back in court his father was awarded sole custody.
As a child, Christian had two small roles in movies: in The Secret Life of an American Wife and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, both released in 1968. He appeared in four other films and four made-for-TV productions, sometimes using the alias Gary Brown between 1980 and 1990. He played a killer in the Sacra Corona Unita (the Quarter Italian Mafia) in the film La Posta in gioco ("The Prize at Stake"), filmed in Southern Italy in 1987.
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