Courtney Love Recalls Visit with 'Repulsive' Marlon Brando, Who She Thought for Years Was Her Grandfather

Rachel DeSantisWed, April 1, 2026 at 9:10 PM UTC

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Courtney Love on The Magnificent Others; Marlon BrandoCredit: The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan/YouTube; Screen Archives/Getty -

Courtney Love believed Marlon Brando might be her grandfather due to his alleged relationship with her grandmother Paula Fox

Love met Brando through Warren Beatty but found him "super repulsive"

Paula Fox, Love’s biological grandmother, gave up Love’s mother for adoption

Courtney Love thought for years that Marlon Brando might be her grandfather — and even though she’s now certain he’s not, she’s opening up about their unimpressive meeting.

The Hole frontwoman, 61, said on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast on Wednesday, April 1 that she long believed the legendary actor to be her grandfather, as he’d allegedly slept with her grandma, the novelist Paula Fox.

“When I met him, I thought he was super repulsive and that tracked. I was like, ‘Oh, I must be related to this guy,’” she told Corgan.

Love said she was friendly with Brando’s neighbor Warren Beatty, and eventually “lobbied him” to facilitate a meeting between the two.

“‘I just want to meet him. I don’t want anything from Marlon Brando,’” she recalled telling Beatty. “And then Warren, he said, ‘Marlon wants a note from you.’ So I wrote him a note. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’”

At one point, after giving the Oscar winner her “word” that she had no ulterior motives, she used Brando’s bathroom and eyed his toothbrush, knowing she could easily swipe it and use his DNA to uncover the truth about her lineage.

“Nah. Like, nah. Maybe I’m too much of a feminist, but I was like, ‘I don’t need your last name.’ That’s how I felt,” she said. “Also, I gave my word. But I’m glad I didn’t because it turned out he wasn’t even my grandfather, so there’s the comedy there.”

Love did not identify her actual grandfather, but noted he was a very tall man.

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Both Fox, who died in 2017 at age 93, and Brando lived with noted acting teacher Stella Adler in the early 1940s, when Fox conceived Love’s mother, Linda Carroll.

Courtney Love in Paris in January 2023.Credit: Arnold Jerocki/Getty

She later gave Carroll, now 81, up for adoption, and Love only learned in adulthood that Fox was her biological grandmother.

The two met just once, and the meeting was a volatile one.

“She’s awful, she’s awful. She’s terrible!” Fox said of Love in The Observer in 2013. “I met with her for an hour, and the hour was like an hour in the devil’s pocket, for both of us… I don't want to be mean.”

The singer, meanwhile, called Fox’s “absolute dislike” of her “shocking and inexplicable.”

Still, Love quipped to the outlet that “if you look at me before my first nose job, I kind of look like Marlon Brando.”

Brando was the father of at least 11 children. He died in 2004 at 80 years old.

on People

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”