Marlon Brando's Harley Davidson to sell for £260,000 at auction

A Harley Davidson once owned by Hollywood Legend Marlon Brando is up for auction. The experts say the motorbike will sell for at least £260,000 when it is sold at Julien's Auctions later this month.

The high price owes much to Brando's fame, because items associated with the iconic star always sell well. In 2005 a script of The Godfather, with notes by Marlon Brando, sold for £202,000 - setting a world record for any script ever sold at auction.

A letter from the creator of The Godfather to Brando, urging him to play Don Corleone, also sold for £85,000, and a letter from Martin Luther King asking Brando for his support in the fight to integrate schools sold for £8,500.

Biking icon

The fact that that this particular piece of memorabilia is a bike sends the price into the stratosphere. Brando was always a biker, and was actually expelled from school for riding one through the corridors. His place in the biking hall of fame was assured in 1953 when he starred as the iconic biker and gang leader in The Wild One.

During his lifetime he owned a number of bikes, but this was the only Harley Davidson he ever bought - picking up the Electra-Glide in 1970, just before he started filming The Godfather.

Motorcycle.com calculated that the estimated price of £260,000 was reasonable, given that Jerry Lee Lewis's bike sold for around £250,000 and Buddy Holly's for about £290,000. However, the auction house told USA Today that there's a chance that the bike could beat the estimate by quite some margin, because it's the first of Brando's bikes that's known to have been sold at auction.

The auction will take place in Los Angeles on 26 June. The auction, held by Julien's Auctions, also features the flaming car owned by the Scorpions gang in Greece, a Dodge Charger built by John Schneider (who played Bo Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard), and the KITT car used in the Knight Rider TV series.