text: Outside Bernardo Bertolucci’s apartment in Rome there is a large goods lift. Once it carried supplies and shopping from floor to floor but now the goods it carries are Bertolucci and one of his three wheelchairs. 
   
   Ten years ago, Bertolucci had what he was told would be routine back surgery on a herniated disc. After the first operation, he was told that there had been a bit of a problem but this could easily be sorted out by another operation. He was told exactly the same thing after his second operation. After his third, he realised he would never walk again. 
   
   Since then he has become a recluse – at least that’s how he describes himself. He seldom goes out, and hardly ever to the cinema, where he once spent almost all his free time. Instead, one wall of his living room is taken up with an enormous white screen. Right now it’s showing a live broadcast of the Papal enthronement taking place half a mile away. Every so often snatches of the Pope’s voice drift in through the open window from one of the PA systems that have been set up all over the city. 
   
   After a few minutes Bertolucci appears, carefully manoeuvring his wheelchair around the furniture. He was always an imposing man: as a teenager I remember seeing photos of him when Last Tango in Paris came out in 1972 and thinking that's exactly how a film director should look. At 73, he may have thickened out and lost some hair but he’s still imposing, even if, as he observes drily, he’s half the height he once was. 
   
   However grim the past few years have been, he is, he insists, feeling a lot better these days. Having been told that he would almost certainly spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, Bertolucci plunged into deep depression, convinced that his career as a director was over. 
   
   “For a long time I was very negative,” he says in thickly impasted English. “The total frustration of not being able to move. Not being able to do anything for myself. As far as I was concerned, I was finished.” But then, in the midst of his depression, he was sent a copy of a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti called – in English – Me and You. As soon as he read the book, Bertolucci decided he wanted to make a film of it. 
   
   “Immediately, it awoke… my desire, you know. I soaked it up like a sponge,” he says. “At that moment, it really felt as if my life depended on that book. And the whole process of making the film was the most fantastic therapy for me. I directed this film with the same passion I’ve directed all my other films. The only difference was that I was sitting down the whole time so my eye line was lower.” 
   
   Me and You is hardly an obviously cinematic novel – it’s set almost entirely in a very gloomy basement. But all the things that might have put someone else off made it ideal for Bertolucci. “There was just one room, only two main characters. I could direct it from my wheelchair without having to move about much. It was perfect.” In fact, he’s always been drawn to enclosed spaces as a director, most famously in Last Tango where Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider seldom ventured outside, mainly because they were far too busy having sexual intercourse. 
   
   Me and You is about a teenage boy who’s supposed to be going on a school skiing trip but who bunks off and spends a week living in the basement of his mother’s apartment building. Although it’s a simple enough story, you don’t have to peer too closely to unearth a metaphor about Bertolucci’s own life. The boy goes down into the depths, essentially puts himself back together again and emerges a lot happier. “I really didn’t think about it like that at the time,” he says. “It was only afterwards that I realised that maybe there’s a kind of similarity.” As he always does, Bertolucci encouraged his actors to improvise a good deal, something he learnt from the great French director Jean Renoir, whom Bertolucci met in Los Angeles in the early Seventies. “My wife [the screenwriter, Clare Peploe] and I went round for dinner and there he was in a wheelchair, surrounded by flowers.” Nearly 40 years on and it’s Bertolucci who’s sitting in a wheelchair surrounded by flowers. It was his 73rd birthday two days earlier and a lot of his friends seem to have sent vast bouquets. 
   
   Jacopo Olmo Antinori as Lorenzo and Tea Falco as Olivia in 'Me and You' 
   
   “I know, I know,” he sighs. “It’s very strange, isn’t it? I remember Renoir gave me this fantastic piece of advice. He said that when you direct you should always leave the door open because unexpected things can come in. In other words, don’t structure everything too rigidly because then there won’t be room to experiment.” It’s advice that has sometimes got him into hot water, most notably in Last Tango when he failed to inform Schneider beforehand that Brando was going to be anally raping her. 
   
   The scene, in which Brando anointed himself with butter, caused a sensation when the film came out. It was also cited by Schneider as the main reason why her life fell apart. She went to her death in 2011 still furious about what she saw as appalling exploitation on Bertolucci’s part. 
   
   Schneider may well have had a legitimate beef. But having interviewed her not that long before she died, I got the feeling that she’d lit on Last Tango as the source of all her woes because it enabled her to shift the blame for the appalling mess she’d made of her life on to someone else. 
   
   When I ask Bertolucci if he thinks he exploited her, he gives another, even longer, sigh. “Did Manet exploit the model for Olympia?” he asks rhetorically. “Did Courbet exploit the model for L’Origine du Monde?” (The painting shows a close-up of a woman’s vagina.) I’m not entirely sure if these are appropriate analogies as neither model was painted being anally raped, but Bertolucci plainly thinks so. 
   
   “No,” he says carefully. “No, I don’t feel guilty, but when she died I thought, God, I’m so sorry that I can’t apologise for what Marlon and I did with that scene and we decided not to tell her. Her sense of humiliation was very real, but I think what really offended her was that she didn’t feel she’d been allowed to prepare for the scene as an actress. But I wanted her reaction as a person, not as an actress.” 
   
   Off the set, Bertolucci has a rather courtly, old-fashioned air – he’s charming, considerate, apparently unflappable. As he admits, though, he’s apt to get carried away when he’s directing, sometimes to the point of ruthlessness. “When you make a movie it’s not always very clear how far you can go. The result is the first thing I am looking for, I have to confess that. I remember when I was directing The Last Emperor, we needed to make the little baby who was playing the emperor cry when he was taken away from the woman playing his mother. We got him to cry in the end” – he gives a throaty chuckle – “but I’m not going to tell you how.” 
   
   Strangely, it wasn’t just Schneider who felt she’d been exploited by Bertolucci – Brando did too. For years afterwards, the two men didn’t talk, much to Bertolucci’s distress. “He wouldn’t return my calls or anything. It was very odd because I thought we were really good friends. We really loved each other. All I could think was that he’d revealed much more of himself than he was comfortable with in the film. Then in about 1992 or 1993, I called him up again and this time he did answer. He said, ‘Where are you?’ I told him I was in LA and he said, ‘Come round. Right now.’” Brando told Bertolucci that his life had fallen apart after his son murdered his daughter’s boyfriend. Subsequently, his daughter committed suicide. “He said, ‘I was dead a few years ago but now I am alive again.’ We ended up talking for hours and hours into the night. After that everything was fine.” 
   
   American actor Marlon Brando with actress Marie Schneider and Bernardo Bertolucci in Bertolucci's film 'Last Tango In Paris'. (Getty Images) 
   
   Bertolucci grew up in what he describes as “a universe of poetry”. His father was a poet, art historian and film critic. “My father basically had two ways of judging anything. Either something was poetic or it wasn’t.” Having published a slim volume of verse in his teens, Bertolucci was thinking that he too might devote his life to poetry when one day the doorbell rang at their family home near Parma. 
   
   “A very sinister looking man was standing there in a black hat. He asked for Professor Bertolucci. I went and woke up my father who was having a nap and told him there was a man outside who looked like a thief.” The man, it turned out, was the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bertolucci ended up dropping out of university and going to work for him. At 22, he directed his first feature film. Eight years later he won a Golden Globe for The Conformist, his adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel about an Italian fascist in the Thirties who is told to kill his former teacher. And then came Last Tango. 
   
   “I remember when I showed the film to my parents, at the end my mother was smiling with pride and my father, who was normally very supportive, was looking furious. When I asked him what the matter was, he said, ‘This film is obscene. We’ll all be put in prison for it.’” He wasn’t far wrong. At an ensuing obscenity trial, an Italian court revoked Bertolucci’s civil rights for five years and gave him a four-month suspended prison sentence. Not that he was too fussed. Last Tango made him the most famous director in the world. 
   
   “It was crazy, you know. I remember going to Singapore and they presented me with all this butter. For a while I think it went to my head; I thought I could do anything I wanted.” He was rapidly disabused of this idea after making 1900, a five-hour period epic about struggling farmers in Emilia-Romagna. “I had this dream about bringing this big socialist story with lots of red flags to the United States.” Perhaps not surprisingly, it wasn’t a vision the film’s US producers shared. After forcing him to make cuts, they gave it a very limited release, leaving Bertolucci “battered and depressed”. However, he bounced back in a big way with what he calls his three “faraway films”: The Sheltering Sky, his adaptation of the Paul Bowles novel, The Last Emperor, which won nine Oscars, and Little Buddha. 
   
   These days, inevitably, his horizons have shrunk. Although he still travels – he has a flat in west London – it’s an awkward business. “I need a little platoon of people to help me.” A lot of the time he stays in his Rome apartment watching box sets on his vast white screen. “The best work being done now is for television,” he says. “Breaking Bad – a masterpiece. House of Cards – very, very good.” 
   
   For large chunks of his life, since his mid-twenties, Bertolucci has been in analysis. I ask him what he thought he got out of it. “I feel it nourished and enriched me as a person. And I feel it nourished and enriched my work. I feel it gave me another lens to my camera, if you know what I mean.” A lens that allowed him to see more deeply into people? Bertolucci smiles. “I think I would feel a bit ridiculous saying that.” He pauses. “But I love that you say it.” 
   
   It’s time for me to head back outside, to where the streets are full of ecstatic-looking Roman Catholic priests streaming out of Vatican City. As I go, I see Bertolucci framed in the doorway. He has one arm raised in farewell. 
   
   Then he lowers his arm, bends forward and pushes himself away. 
   
   'Me and You' is released in cinemas today 
   
   Follow Telegraph Film on Twitter ||||| Mother of 10: Central Park 5, Wrinkle in Time, Queen Sugar, Selma, Middle of Nowhere, 13th, Venus VS, I Will Follow, My Mic Sounds Nice, This is The Life. xo 
   
   Los Angeles ||||| CLOSE A newly resurfaced video of acclaimed Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci has sparked outrage regarding the controversial rape scene in 'The Last Tango in Paris.' Time 
   
   Marlon Brando (right) and Maria Schneider in 'The Last Tango in Paris.' (Photo: AP) 
   
   That notorious rape scene in 1972’s Last Tango in Paris wasn’t real, but it wasn’t consensual, either — and Hollywood is reacting with belated outrage. 
   
   Video of a 2013 interview with the movie’s Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has resurfaced, Yahoo reports, in which he acknowledges that he and the late Marlon Brando, in his late 40s at the time, thought up using a stick of butter to rape Jeanne, the character played by the movie’s 19-year-old star Maria Schneider, just prior to the shoot. 
   
   “There was a baguette, there was butter and we looked at each other and, without saying anything, we knew what we wanted,” says Bertolucci, now 75, in footage filmed at La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated.” 
   
   “I feel guilty,” the director added, but said he didn’t regret shooting the scene the way he did. 
   
   News that the scene was a surprise came out well before Bertolucci’s interview: Schneider, who died in 2011 at age 58, told The Daily Mail in 2007 that the rape wasn’t in the script and she found out about it right before the cameras rolled. 
   
   “I was so angry,” she said, specifying that the sex was simulated. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that. … I was crying real tears.” 
   
   Celebs reacted with disbelief as the story spread after footage from Bertolucci’s interview was uploaded to YouTube on Nov. 23. Some had the impression a rape occurred on camera; others noted that the actress hadn't agreed to the traumatizing scene. 
   
   To all the people that love this film- you're watching a 19yr old get raped by a 48yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick. https://t.co/qVDom2gYf6 — Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) December 3, 2016 
   
   I second that. This is heartbreaking and outrageous. The 2 of them are very sick individuals to think that was ok. https://t.co/Ft4SArjcgd — #EvanRachelWould (@evanrachelwood) December 3, 2016 
   
   All copies of this film should be destroyed immediately. It contains an actual rape and sexual assault. #disgusting#disgracehttps://t.co/pKKdSlBDbU — Jenna Fischer (@jennafischer) December 3, 2016 
   
   You're a director & want to film real pain? Real terror? Real shame? Do documentaries. Don't put your actors thru surprise hell w/o consent. — Zelda Williams (@zeldawilliams) December 4, 2016 
   
   Were this a rape scene in a script when an actor was hired, or one that was planned & could be practiced, that'd be a very different story. — Zelda Williams (@zeldawilliams) December 4, 2016 
   
   Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage https://t.co/uvaLogvv7I — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) December 3, 2016 
   
   Maria Schneider, who checked herself into the psych ward for a few days so she could be with her committed lover Joan Townsend. Even there they were harassed and photographed. RIP beautiful lady. I'm so sorry that art became pain rather than release for you. (Image courtesy of Old Loves Tumblr) A photo posted by Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) on Dec 4, 2016 at 12:55am PST 
   
   The erotic drama, originally rated X, is the tale of an American widower (Brando) who embarks on a sexual relationship with a young French woman (Schneider) whose name he doesn’t know. Last Tango had its U.S. release in 1973; Brando was nominated for best actor and Bertolucci for best director at the 1974 Academy Awards. 
   
   Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2h3E9Va ||||| Jessica Chastain Retweetade ELLE Magazine (US) 
   
   To all the people that love this film- you're watching a 19yr old get raped by a 48yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick.https://twitter.com/ELLEmagazine/status/804910484587773952 … ||||| Chris Evans, Jessica Chastain and more have spoken out about a recently resurfaced interview in which Bernardo Bertolucci admitted Maria Schneider wasn't made aware of details of the crucial scene prior to the day of shooting. 
   
   One of the most notorious scenes in cinema history, the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider butter rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, is making headlines once again, 44 years after the film's debut. 
   
   In a recently resurfaced video interview from 2013, Bertolucci confirms that Schneider, who died in 2011, did not know the details of the rape scene ahead of time, and that the graphic nature of the scene was improvised on set. 
   
   “We were having, with Marlon, breakfast on the floor of the flat where I was shooting. There was a baguette, there was butter and we looked at each other and, without saying anything, we knew what we wanted,” the director said then. “I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on.” 
   
   Bertolucci said he felt guilty about how he treated Schneider, but does not regret the scene. 
   
   Nothing in the resurfaced video is news as the director has been very vocal about his filming of the scene and how it affected Maria Schneider in multiple interviews over the years, most recently during a press tour for his last film Me and You, during which the YouTube video interview was shot. 
   
   Bertolucci expressed roughly the same sentiment in a 2013 interview with The Telegraph: “No, I don’t feel guilty, but when she died I thought, God, I’m so sorry that I can’t apologize for what Marlon and I did with that scene and we decided not to tell her. Her sense of humiliation was very real, but I think what really offended her was that she didn’t feel she’d been allowed to prepare for the scene as an actress. But I wanted her reaction as a person, not as an actress.” 
   
   Celebrities voiced their disgust at the resurfaced news on Twitter. Jessica Chastain said of the revelations, “The director planned her attack. I feel sick," while Chris Evans tweeted that Bertolucci and Brando "should be in jail.” Ava DuVernay wrote, "As a woman, I am horrified, disgusted and enraged by it." 
   
   See more reactions below. 
   
   To all the people that love this film- you're watching a 19yr old get raped by a 48yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick. https://t.co/qVDom2gYf6 — Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) December 3, 2016 
   
   I second that. This is heartbreaking and outrageous. The 2 of them are very sick individuals to think that was ok. https://t.co/Ft4SArjcgd — #EvanRachelWould (@evanrachelwood) December 3, 2016 
   
   Inexcusable. As a director, I can barely fathom this. As a woman, I am horrified, disgusted and enraged by it. https://t.co/voGRhafy9K — Ava DuVernay (@ava) December 4, 2016 
   
   Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage https://t.co/uvaLogvv7I — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) December 3, 2016 
   
   @AnnaKendrick47 @colliderfrosty had no idea. Woulda felt rage then too. They should be in jail. — Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) December 3, 2016 
   
   Anna Kendrick noted that Schneider's lack of knowledge of the scene prior to the shooting day was nothing new. “Ms Schneider stated this several years ago. I used to get eye-rolls when I brought it up to people (aka dudes),” she tweeted. 
   
   "I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that,” Schneider said in a 2007 Daily Mail interview. 
   
   She continued, "Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. … I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol — I wanted to be recognized as an actress and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown." 
   
   Schneider added, "I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.” 
   
   The actress claims that the late Brando also felt taken advantage of by Bertolucci, so it was easy to imagine how the experience affected the young actress. “Marlon said he felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48,” she said. “And he was Marlon Brando!" 
   
   It’s also well known that Schneider, who struggled with drug addiction and mental health issues, has blamed the infamous film for the downhill trajectory of her life. She went on to star in renowned films including Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, but said she was unable to get past the notoriety that came with starring in Bertolucci’s film. 
   
   Last Tango in Paris was critically lauded but surrounded in public controversy. Bertolucci was put on trial for obscenity in Italy after the release of the movie. Copies of the film were destroyed at the time and Bertolucci was served with a four-month suspended sentence and denied his civil (including voting) rights for five years. Last Tango earned Brando a best actor Oscar nomination and Bertolucci a best director nomination. ||||| Tweet with a location 
   
   You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| Bernardo Bertolucci sparks outrage after 2013 interview surfaces in which he says he ‘wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress’ 
   
   Comments by the director of the film Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci, that he conspired with Marlon Brando to film a graphic rape scene without the consent of 19-year-old actor Maria Schneider have prompted outrage in Hollywood. 
   
   
   
   Speaking in a video from 2013 that surfaced recently, Bertolucci said he and Brando came up with the idea to shoot the infamous scene depicting assault, in which Brando’s character uses a stick of butter to anally rape his lover, played by Schneider. 
   
   “The sequence of the butter is an idea that I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting,” Bertulocci said at an event held at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2013. He said he “wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress”. 
   
   
   
   Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bertolucci speaks about the infamous scene depicting assault 
   
   “I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn’t tell her that there was that detail of the butter used as lubricant,” he said. 
   
   Although he admitted that not telling her the plan was “horrible”, Bertolucci said he didn’t regret how he decided to direct the scene. 
   
   Last Tango in Paris – which was made in 1972 and tells the story of a man who enters into an anonymous affair after his wife takes her own life – shocked audiences when it was released due to its graphic depictions of sex and rape and is still considered to be controversial. At the time of filming Brando was 48, while Schneider was 19. 
   
   Schneider, who went on to have serious drug addiction problems and depression, said in 2007 that she felt humiliated and “a little raped”. During the interview Schneider confirmed the scene was simulated and there was no real sex. 
   
   Last Tango in Paris rape scene claims 'not true at all', says cinematographer Read more 
   
   She said she was told about the contents of the scene shortly before the shoot and that it wasn’t in the original script. 
   
   “I was so angry, she said. “I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that,” she told the Daily Mail. 
   
   “Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie’.” 
   
   “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take,” she said. Schneider died from cancer in 2011. 
   
   Bertolucci’s comments prompted outrage on social media, with celebrities among those calling for the director to be stripped of his awards or to be prosecuted. 
   
   Jessica Chastain said the comments made her feel sick. 
   
   Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) To all the people that love this film- you're watching a 19yr old get raped by a 48yr old man. The director planned her attack. I feel sick. https://t.co/qVDom2gYf6 
   
   
   
   Evan Rachel Wood retweeted Chastain’s comments, adding, “I second that. This is heartbreaking and outrageous. The 2 of them are very sick individuals to think that was ok.” 
   
   Chris Evans wrote: “Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage,” which prompted a response from Anna Kendrick. 
   
   “Ms Schneider stated this several years ago. I used to get eye-rolls when I brought it up to people (aka dudes),” Kendrick tweeted. Evans replied that the men should be in jail. 
   
   Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) @AnnaKendrick47 @colliderfrosty had no idea. Woulda felt rage then too. They should be in jail. 
   
   Australian Associated Press contributed to this report 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   ||||| by LINA DAS 
   
   Last updated at 22:45 19 July 2007 
   
   As the star of Last Tango In Paris, Maria Schneider took part in the most infamous sex scene ever. In this rare interview she reveals the devastating consequences 
   
   Last Tango In Paris was undoubtedly one of the most influential - and controversial - films of the last century. Starring Marlon Brando, then aged 48 and exuding aggressive masculinity, and Maria Schneider, a 19-year-old French unknown, it featured one of the most infamous movie sex scenes ever filmed. 
   
   Denounced as obscene, the film - a tale of lust between an older man and younger woman who meet for anonymous and increasingly racy sexual encounters -was banned in many countries, including areas of Britain. It also scandalised the remaining movie-goers who actually got to see it. 
   
   Scroll down for more... 
   
   Now Last Tango In Paris is being re-released to mark the 35th anniversary of Bernardo Bertolucci's iconic movie. Despite its notoriety, the film won Oscar nominations for both Bertolucci and Brando and catapulted Schneider to worldwide fame. 
   
   Brando's performance was notably intense and described as verging on the autobiographical. 
   
   Yet, while Last Tango brought Schneider immediate recognition, the fall-out from the movie for the young actress was spectacular. 
   
   Unprepared for the worldwide attention the film brought, she soon embarked on a path of self-destruction with fraught romantic entanglements, suicide attempts and a lapse into drug addiction. 
   
   That she is alive - and seemingly at peace these days - is testimony to her fortitude. 
   
   Scroll down for more... 
   
   "It's amazing. I've made 50 films in my career and Last Tango is 35 years old, but it's still the one that everyone asks me about," she says. 
   
   Schneider lives in Paris, and at 55, retains the enviable figure that she so magnificently paraded, mostly nude, in Last Tango. 
   
   The baby-faced prettiness is still there, if a little more knowing these days, her long, curly hair is pinned up and her face devoid of make-up. 
   
   "Marlon was shy about his body, but nudity wasn't a problem for me in those days as I thought it was beautiful," she says, her voice husky and smoke-tinged. 
   
   "People still recognise me in the street and say I haven't changed, which is good. 
   
   "However, I never went naked in a movie again after Last Tango, even though I was offered many such roles. People today are used to such things but when the film opened in 1972, it was scandalous." 
   
   Watching the film now with its over-wrought score, its scenes replete with meaningful silences and its sexual content, much of Last Tango, unlike Schneider, has aged. 
   
   "I watched it again three years ago after Marlon died and it seems kitsch," she exclaims. 
   
   "I think Bertolucci is over-rated and he never really made anything after Last Tango that had the same impact. 
   
   "He was fat and sweaty and very manipulative, both of Marlon and myself, and would do certain things to get a reaction from me. Some mornings on set he would be very nice and say hello and on other days, he wouldn't say anything at all. 
   
   "I was too young to know better. Marlon later said that he felt manipulated, and he was Marlon Brando, so you can imagine how I felt. People thought I was like the girl in the movie, but that wasn't me. 
   
   "I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol - I wanted to be recognised as an actress and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown. 
   
   "Now, though, I can look at the film and like my work in it." 
   
   In the film, Schneider plays Jeanne, a girl engaged to a somewhat annoying filmmaker, Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who goes to view an apartment in Paris. There she chances upon Paul (Brando), an American expatriate whose wife has committed suicide. 
   
   They have a passionate affair knowing nothing about one another (Paul insists they don't even reveal their names), with a tragic ending. 
   
   They engage in some steamy clinches, the most famous involving Schneider face down on the apartment floor while Brando applies butter to her nether regions and performs a sex act on her. 
   
   "That scene wasn't in the original script. The truth is it was Marlon who came up with the idea," she says. 
   
   "They only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry. 
   
   "I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that. 
   
   "Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. 
   
   "I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take." 
   
   Many believed that the sex scenes between Brando and Schneider were for real, but she insists: "Not at all. There was no attraction between us. For me, he was more like a father figure and I a daughter. 
   
   "Marlon said to me: 'You look just like Cheyenne (his daughter, who subsequently committed suicide in 1995) with your baby face.' 
   
   "He gave me advice about the movie industry. 
   
   "When I celebrated my 20th birthday during filming, my trailer was filled with flowers and there was a note saying: 'From an unknown admirer.' 
   
   "We stayed friends until the end, although for a while we couldn't talk about the movie. Undoubtedly, my best experience about making the film was my encounter with Marlon. 
   
   "I almost refused to do the film. I had an offer to star in another film, with Alain Delon, but my agency, William Morris, said: 'It's a leading role with Marlon Brando - you can't refuse.' 
   
   "I was so young and relatively inexperienced and I didn't understand all of the film's sexual content. I had a bit of a bad feeling about it all." 
   
   Her instincts were right. Together with the scandal the film created, the media interest in Maria was huge. 
   
   "To be suddenly famous all over the world was frightening. I didn't have bodyguards like they do today. People thought I was just like my character and I would make up stories for the press, but that wasn't me." 
   
   The whole circus, she says, "made me go mad. I got into drugs - pot and then cocaine, LSD and heroin - it was like an escape from reality. It was the Seventies and at that time, it was all going on. 
   
   "I didn't enjoy being famous at all and drugs were my escape. I took pills to try and commit suicide but I survived because God decided it wasn't the time for me to go. 
   
   "I suppose it was like a suicide when I overdosed two or three times on drugs, but each time I woke up when the ambulance arrived. 
   
   "I was very lucky - I lost many friends to drugs - but I met someone in 1980 who helped me stop. I call this person my angel and we've been together ever since. I don't say if it's a man or a woman. That's my secret garden. I like to keep it a mystery." 
   
   Schneider's "angel" is likely to be a woman. 
   
   She has admitted relationships with women before and, in 1975, went to a mental hospital in Rome and committed herself as a voluntary patient in order to be with her then lover, photographer Joan Townsend. 
   
   "She was schizophrenic," Schneider explains. "I wanted to help. She eventually went back home to the States but now, I don't know what has happened to her." 
   
   Schneider never married, nor did she have children. 
   
   "It just wasn't in my destiny and I have no regrets," she says, although she admits to a deep distrust of men. 
   
   "Even before my experiences on Last Tango, I found it hard to trust men. I only met my father when I was 15 (French actor Daniel Gelin, who had an affair with Schneider's mother Marie Christine when she was 17) and all the role models in my family were women." 
   
   She grew up near the Franco-German border and after an argument with her mother, ran away from home at 15. 
   
   Maria moved to Paris, making ends meet by working as an extra and a model and lived alone despite the fact that her father was in Paris - he was unwilling or unable to take in his daughter. 
   
   It was Brigitte Bardot, a former co-star of her father's, who came to her rescue. Bardot was horrified that his daughter was left to fend for herself. 
   
   "She gave me a room at her place," Maria says, "and it was through her I joined the William Morris Agency. Sometimes, I call her now to see how she is and she is very bitter at the movie industry." 
   
   After Last Tango, Schneider's career didn't fare as well as she might have hoped. 
   
   In 1975 she made The Passenger with Jack Nicholson, but otherwise, good roles have been sparse. She was due to film Caligula alongside Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren but walked off when she realised its pornographic content. 
   
   She was offered the role of Mary in Franco Zeffirelli's TV spectacular, Jesus of Nazareth, but turned it down - a decision she regrets. 
   
   One expects Schneider to be embittered by her experiences, but she is extremely chatty and giggly, although her animosity towards Bertolucci remains undimmed. 
   
   "I've not really forgiven him for the way he treated me and although we met in Tokyo 17 years ago, I ignored him," she says cheerfully. "Plus, he and Marlon made a fortune from the movie and I made about £2,500. And Bertolucci was a Communist, too!" 
   
   Schneider now runs The Wheel Turns, an organisation which helps ageing actors and performers who suddenly find work drying up. 
   
   Schneider herself continues to work, mainly in France and Italy, although she says: "It is not so easy for actresses over 50, and the irony is that when a woman gets old enough to have something interesting to say, people don't want to hear her speak." 
   
   She says her pleasures these days are very simple. 
   
   "I like to see friends and go to the market and cook. But I never use butter to cook any more," she laughs. "Only olive oil." 
   
   • For details on cinemas screening Last Tango In Paris, go to: www.parkcircus.com
target: – Last Tango in Paris was released in 1972 to critical acclaim, but people are now "sick" and "enraged" after a 2013 interview resurfaced in which director Bernardo Bertolucci admitted the infamous rape scene in it was a little too real. In the interview, which was uploaded to YouTube on Nov. 23, Bertolucci said he and Marlon Brando, then 48, decided a stick of butter should be used as lubricant to rape the character of Jeanne without telling actress Maria Schneider, who was then 19. "I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn't tell her what was going on," Bertolucci said, per the Hollywood Reporter, noting he wanted Schneider to react "as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated." Bertolucci also made similar comments to the Telegraph in 2013, only to then be described as "charming." This isn't exactly breaking news: Schneider, who died in 2011, recounted the scene to the Daily Mail in 2007, saying "even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears" and felt "a little raped both by Marlon and Bertolucci." Brando and Bertolucci were later nominated for best actor and best director Oscars, respectively, for their work on the film, reports USA Today. "I feel sick," Jessica Chastain tweeted Saturday, per the Guardian. Evan Rachel Wood said the admission was "heartbreaking and outrageous," while Chris Evans said Bertolucci and Brando "should be in jail." Anna Kendrick said she "used to get eye-rolls" when she mentioned Bertolucci's comments to people, particularly men. Added Ava DuVernay, "As a director, I can barely fathom this. As a woman, I am horrified, disgusted and enraged by it."