Movies

Sacheen Littlefeather, who turned down Brando’s Oscar, dies at 75

October 3, 2022

Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American actress and activist who made Oscar history in 1973, turning down the Best Actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando and shaking the Academy – and an estimated 85 million viewers – with her speech condemning mistreatment inflicted on American Indians, died October 2 at her home in Marin County, California. She was 75 years old.

The cause was breast cancer, said Calina Lawrence, her niece and carer. Ms Littlefeather was diagnosed in 2018 with breast cancer which spread to her right lung, according to an article in A.frame, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ digital magazine.

For decades, the Oscars have largely eschewed politics and social issues, earning a reputation as Hollywood’s biggest night while serving as a glitzy showcase for the movies and the people who made them. Ms Littlefeather’s speech helped change that, ushering in an era where actors and filmmakers increasingly used their acceptance speeches to call out injustice, criticize politicians and urge the industry to diversify its ranks and better represent women and people of color.

Ms. Littlefeather, 26 was the first Native American woman to appear onstage at the Oscars, according to the Academy. Addressing the audience in loafers and a buckskin dress, she explained that Brando, a Native American rights activist, had written “a very long speech” but was unable to deliver it “for lack of time”. She later said that the show’s producer, Howard W. Koch, threatened to have her arrested if she spoke for more than a minute.

On stage, she denounced the offensive clichés of American Indians perpetuated in film and television and drew attention to “recent events at Wounded Knee”, where a dispute over corruption at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota led to a standoff with federal authorities.

His speech was interrupted once by a mixture of boos and applause, and she later recalled looking up at the mostly white audience — “a sea of Clorox,” as she put it — and having saw the tomahawk chop, a racist gesture. By the end of the night, Brando’s front door had been pierced with two bullets, according to Ms Littlefeather.

“I went there thinking I could make a difference,” she told People magazine in 1990. “I was very naive. I talked to people about the oppression. They said “You’re ruining our evening.”

Ms Littlefeather had known Brando for about a year when she took the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on his behalf, turning down the award he had received for playing mob boss Vito Corleone in ‘The Godfather’.

According to Mrs. Littlefeather and Oscars television director Marty Pasetta, Western star John Wayne allegedly tried to rush onto the stage and attack Mrs. Littlefeather, but was restrained by six security guards. This account was later dismissed as a Hollywood fable by film historian Farran Smith Nehme and Wayne biographer Scott Eyman, who noted that the actor was in poor health and that the “six security men” did not were mentioned only years later.

Either way, the general reaction to Ms Littlefeather’s remarks was clear from the rest of the ceremony. Introducing the Best Actress winner, Raquel Welch joked, “I hope they don’t have a cause.” When Clint Eastwood announced best picture, he joked, “I don’t know if I have to present this award on behalf of all the cowboys who’ve been cast in all of John Ford’s westerns over the years.

Within days, other Hollywood stars weighed in, dismissing Ms Littlefeather’s speech as a publicity stunt and chastising Brando for not showing up to the ceremony in person. Rumors proliferated about Ms Littlefeather allegedly being an engaged stripper or actress from Mexico. She went on to appear in half a dozen films, with small roles in westerns such as ‘The Trial of Billy Jack’ (1974), but said she was blacklisted – or ‘redlisted’ , as she said – by Hollywood studios that refused to hire her because of her Oscar appearance.

“I spoke from my heart,” she told The Associated Press days after the ceremony. “These words were written in blood, maybe my own blood. I felt almost like Christ carrying the weight of the cross on his shoulders.

Many Native American activists celebrated her as a heroine. Russell Means, a leader of the protest movement at Wounded Knee, credited him with bringing renewed attention to the protest, which was symbolically located at the site of the massacre of the Lakota people in 1890 by army soldiers. American. Gunfire was exchanged during the occupation, killing two Native Americans and crippling a federal agent.

Native American filmmakers and producers, including Bird Runningwater, also saw Ms. Littlefeather as a trailblazer, a crucial link in a movement toward more sensitive and accurate portrayals of Native American life in television shows like “Reservation Dogs” and films such than “Prey”. “The moment we live in now,” Runningwater told NPR in August, “is something she and our film community always dreamed of 50 years ago.”

In June, then-Academy President David Rubin sent her a “statement of reconciliation”, writing that the harassment and discrimination she had suffered over the years “was unwarranted and unwarranted”.

Academy apologizes to Native American woman who turned down Brando’s Oscar

“All we were asking, and I was asking, was, ‘Let’s get to work. Let’s be ourselves. Let’s play ourselves in the movies. Let’s be part of your industry, producing, directing, writing,” she said in an August interview with A.frame about the night she took the Oscars stage. “’Don’t write our stories for us. Let’s write our own stories. Let’s be who we are. ”

Mrs Littlefeather was born Marie Louisa Cross in Salinas, California, November 14, 1946. His mother, a leather stamper and pianist, was white; his father, a saddler and painter, was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.

She told the Guardian she ‘was abused and neglected’ as a child and dated her campaigning career to the night she saw her father beat her mother and tried to stop the attack by hitting him with a broom. She ran out of the house and, when her father chased her in his truck, climbed a tree.

Ms Littlefeather was raised primarily by her maternal grandparents and said she was bullied at school because of her dark skin and straight black hair. As a teenager, she attempted suicide and was hospitalized for a year, following a nervous breakdown she attributed to her struggle to reconcile her white and Native American identities.

By her early twenties, she had moved to San Francisco and become involved in the American Indian Movement, joining other urban Indians to reconnect with their ancestry and campaign for Native American rights. She began using a new name, Sacheen, and supported herself as a model, winning the Miss American Vampire beauty pageant in 1970 as part of a promotion for a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer horror film.

She also appeared in television commercials and served as the public service director of a San Francisco radio station. As she said, she met Brando through her Bay Area neighbor Francis Ford Coppola, the director of “The Godfather,” who promised to deliver the actor a letter she had written about his interest in Native American issues. Their relationship culminated when Brando called her the night before the Oscars to invite her to attend the ceremony on his behalf.

Brando then praised his appearance during an interview on ‘The Dick Cavett Show’ – “they should have at least had the courtesy to listen to him”, he said – while Ms Littlefeather studied at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

In the early 1980s, after recovering from severe lung disease due to childhood tuberculosis, she studied nutrition on the campus of Antioch University in San Francisco. She then worked as a health consultant for Indigenous communities.

At the time of her Oscar speech, she was married to Michael Rubio, an engineer. She then married Charles Koshiway Johnston, her companion of 32 years, who died in 2021. Survivor information was not immediately available.

During the AIDS epidemic, Ms. Littlefeather worked at a Bay Area hospice founded by Mother Teresa. Reconnecting with her childhood Catholic faith, she also led a prayer circle in San Francisco named for Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th-century Algonquin and Mohawk woman who was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI. The band mixed traditions, including incorporating buffalo dances into the Catholic Mass.

“That’s how I saved my life, mixing the two,” Ms Littlefeather told the Guardian in 2021. “Accepting the ways of my dominant culture and my Indian ways together, living peacefully side by side .”