In the mood for Marilyn | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

MOVIE REVIEW

Marilyn Monroe was a real woman, but through the decades she has also existed as an image _ and an imagination. The later generation, appreciating Monroe in iconic, sex pot poses and perky screen persona, associates a wide gamut of ideas, fantasies and conjectures with her and her era, the '50s. A powerful presence on the screen (her movies lose meaning when she's not in the frame), she's also a blank page on which you supply your own surmises and assumptions, theories and conclusions. It says a lot when, in probably her most famous movie from 1955, The Seven Year Itch, Monroe plays a character with no name: it's enough to know her as The Girl.

Now Michelle Williams plays Monroe in the enjoyable yet somewhat thin My Week With Marilyn, which opened at the Lido yesterday. Meanwhile long in gestation is Blonde, in which Naomi Watts, less buxom admittedly, plays the actress in the story adapted from a "fictitious memoir" by Joyce Carol Oates. To feminists and boys, to revisionists and worshippers, Monroe still exerts an influence that hovers between wonder and alarm, between transparency and riddle.

In 1956 Monroe, 30, at the height of her fame and six years away from her death, arrived in London to film the comedy, The Prince and the Showgirl, with Sir Laurence Olivier, Britain's most respected director/actor of the time. On the set, Monroe, who came to England with her third husband Arthur Miller, veered from insecurity to juvenilism; she arrived late for hours, broke down in front of the camera, then sought numb comfort in pills, drinks and her acting coach who kept whispering in her ears how she was the best actress in the world. All of this is recorded in a memoir published in 1995 by Colin Clark, who as a young man served as Sir Olivier's assistant on the set and who claimed to have a brief, chaste, wistful relationship with the blonde actress during the shoot.