My week with Marilyn

I’ve been a Marilyn Monroe fan for as long as I can remember. Her sheer glamour, loveable persona and that beautiful face and figure made her my key beauty icon whilst I was growing up. Add in her tumultuous love life and mysterious death and you get one of the most fascinating personalities of the 20th century. But even with all these key ingredients, making a good film about this Icon has been difficult. The best portrayal was by Catherine Hicks in the 1980 film, Marilyn – The Untold Story. She managed to portray the vulnerability of Marilyn, but the film itself was dire.

But now we may just have found a Marilyn film worth watching, with a star born to play the role. Step forward the always wonderful Michelle Williams in the new film ‘My week with Marilyn’. Based on the book by Colin Clarke, this tells of Marilyn’s stay in England for the filming of ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. This was a Marilyn surrounded by movie legends such as Sir Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, newly married to Arthur Miller, and slowly falling apart at the seams has her dreams of acting acceptance and the perfect marriage fell apart too.

From the trailers, Michelle looks perfect, uncannily like Marilyn, all soft curves, dreamy features and vulnerable persona. And the style is wonderful – worlds away from the all glitzy, glowing Marilyn of Hollywood. This was Marilyn in neat shirts and pencil skirts, chic little black dresses, stiletto heels and dark black shades. In short, a woman with style in spades. The making of the Prince and the Showgirl was an unhappy experience for Marilyn, Olivier telling her to ‘be sexy’ was a bad start to the proceedings, but Marilyn totally stole the film from under his hammy nose, something that he did acknowledge years later.