Marlon Brando’s son has died, aged just 49.
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Christian Brando passed away in the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Centre, Los Angeles, on Saturday morning from complications caused by pneumonia.
His ex-wife Deborah Presley revealed he had been in a coma ever since being admitted to hospital on January 11.
She said: “His body was totally compromised. He’d lived so hard. This is just so sad.”
David Seeley, a lawyer for the Marlon Brando estate, added: “This is a sad and difficult time for the family.”
In 1990, Christian, a known drug user, was sentenced to ten years in jail for voluntary manslaughter after shooting dead Dag Drollett, the boyfriend of his then pregnant half-sister Cheyenne.
Cheyenne hanged herself in 1995, a year before her brother’s release from prison.
Christian’s mother was Anna Kashfi, a Welsh actress of Indian descent, whose husband Marlon described as “probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen”.
The pair married in October 1957 and divorced in April 1959.
Speaking about his son at the 1990 court case, Marlon talked of his bitter battle with Kashfi for custody of Christian, and claimed she once kidnapped him and took him to Mexico.
Marlon insisted that by the time he won permanent custody, Christian was 13 and a “basket case of emotional disorder”.
He added: “I think I perhaps failed him as a father. The tendency is to blame the other parent. But I am certain there are things I could have done differently.”
Christian is believed to have spent most of his life living off his father’s fortune after failing to find success as an actor.
In 2005, he was put on three years probation and forced to undergo treatment for alcohol and drug addiction after pleading guilty to beating his then-wife Deborah.
