The Telegraph
While making The Prince and the Showgirl, Marilyn Monroe took a shine to a lowly assistant director. Their brief relationship is now at the heart of a new film.
The year 1956 was a pivotal one in British history, politically and culturally. The Suez crisis rocked the nation's standing in the world, and Anthony Eden's authority as prime minister began unravelling. Rock'n'roll established its grip on the pop charts, while in the theatre, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger premiered at the Royal Court, effectively sweeping away generations of genteel, escapist British plays.
'It was the last of please and thank-yous, collars and ties, and bobbies on the beat,' says Kenneth Branagh, whose new film bears witness to this clash of generations and cultures. 'After this, haircuts were longer, there was rock'n'roll and all the sex involved with it. Politeness, manners, formality, dress codes – all those things were being swept away.'
Against this backdrop, Colin Clark, a young man of 23, talked himself into a lowly job with Laurence Olivier's film production company. Clark was hired as third assistant director (read 'gofer') on the film The Prince and the Showgirl, shot at Pinewood Studios and starring Olivier, leading light of the conservative British acting establishment, and Marilyn Monroe, then the hottest star in Hollywood.
They had separate agendas: Olivier wanted Monroe's formidable glamour to rub off on him and rekindle his career in films, while she hoped working with the multiple award- winning actor and director would bring her the respect that she craved. As individuals, Olivier, then 49, and Monroe, 30, were chalk and cheese: he the rigorous, disciplined knight of the realm with impeccable manners; she a mercurial refugee from Hollywood, prone to mood swings, infuriatingly late on set, continually fluffing her lines, and troubled by pills, booze and a new marriage (to the eminent playwright Arthur Miller) that was already looking shaky.
Clark had the presence of mind to write a diary about his experiences on the film, and chronicle this clash of egos and cultures. Clark, who went on to make more than 100 arts documentaries and who died in 2002, published his diaries, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, to great acclaim in 1995. He wrote about that fateful period with a delicious, gossipy wit (Clark was the younger brother of another renowned diarist, the late Alan Clark MP – bon vivant and flamboyant womaniser). He offered a vivid account of the problems each day on the set seemed to bring, and is at his best on the prickly relationship between Monroe and Olivier (to whom he refers in shorthand as MM and SLO). 'MM doesn't really forget her lines,' he wrote. 'It is more as if she had never quite learnt them – as if they are pinned to her mental noticeboard so loosely that the slightest puff of wind will send them floating to the floor.'
But in 2000, following the success of the first book, Clark published My Week with Marilyn, an account of their nine days together, an experience, Clark said, 'so dramatic and extraordinary that it was impossible to include it in my daily chatterings'. And now comes a film based on both books, also called My Week with Marilyn, starring the American actress Michelle Williams as Monroe, with a British cast headed by 28-year-old Eddie Redmayne as Clark and Kenneth Branagh as Olivier – an actor with whom he was often compared in his younger days.
For the director Simon Curtis, the social and political background to this gently romantic interlude is as interesting as the main story itself. 'At that time Olivier had become emblematic of a fading Britain. Marilyn was emblematic of an exciting, complicated new America. Arguably, 1956 is the year that Britain finally started to shake off the shadow of the Second World War. Rationing had only just ended. So for me, this is about Marilyn and her glamorous, colourful American entourage arriving in black-and-white England.'
Curtis first approached the producer David Parfitt about a possible film based on the books seven years ago. 'Everyone liked the idea,' Parfitt recalls. But one problem about making a film about Monroe is that she feels so familiar and iconic: what is left to say? She died almost 50 years ago, aged 36, but remains firmly part of the collective consciousness. We think we know everything about her, from her curvaceous frame, that breathy, babyish voice, her sexy shimmy, to her failed marriages and affairs, and her tragic premature death from a drug overdose in 1962.
Adrian Hodges, the film's screenwriter, saw the problem immediately. 'Is there anyone more famous to write about? Princess Diana, possibly. Even people who don't know why they know Marilyn Monroe know her. That's how big she is in the culture. If you'd said to me one day I'd write a film about her, I'd have been amazed, because I wouldn't have known where to start.'
The saving grace for Hodges was that Clark's books about Monroe are snapshots of a short, specific time, which meant he could avoid the cliches and caricatures now associated with the actress. Thus, he says, his script is 'a view of her as a woman of 30, at a crossroads, still close enough to the person she'd been to have contact with reality. She was not quite the fading supernova. I liked the idea that this was before anything was inevitable for her.
'I felt the world could also use a generous view of Marilyn. The film isn't uncritical of her behaviour and it certainly doesn't give her a free pass. It's just that I think there are other things to say about someone who was once a complete person, not just this… thing.'
Michelle Williams also admits to feeling nervous about playing Monroe. 'How could you not be? I'd always been interested in the private Marilyn, the Marilyn before "Marilyn". Even as a young girl, my primary connection wasn't with this larger-than-life personality, but with what was going on underneath.'
As Williams sees the story, 'She was expecting to go to London and make a movie with the most esteemed actor of the time. When she arrived she felt she was being mistreated and laughed at. Olivier… didn't treat her with the kind of attention she was hoping for. She felt she needed allies – and she found one in Colin Clark.'
Although it is Marilyn's name in the film's title, Clark emerges as an equally fascinating individual. He came from a very privileged background; an early scene in the film shows him driving away from the magnificent Saltwood Castle in Kent, where he grew up. (The real castle was used in the film.) His father was the renowned art historian Kenneth Clark, best known as the writer and presenter of the television series Civilisation. Eddie Redmayne found Clark a complex character. 'There's a sense that Colin has come from a life of privilege,' he says, 'but there was something idiosyncratic about him. He went to Eton, but while all his friends were hunting, shooting and fishing types, his father was an art historian – at a time when no one quite knew what a historian was. He was slightly embarrassed about it.
'At one point he became a zookeeper for six months, just because he wanted to. He had a rather glamorous background – with people like Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Margot Fonteyn visiting his parents' home for tea. So he came out of Eton and Oxford with tremendous confidence, but in need of an emotional education.'
Clark littered his diaries with nonchalant accounts of casual sex, both straight and gay. In My Week with Marilyn, though, it is clear he was entranced by the world's best-known actress. The nearest he came to consummating their relationship was when they spent the day together in a chauffeured car, visiting Windsor Castle (where Clark's godfather was the librarian), his old school Eton, and driving through Windsor Great Park where they stripped off to swim in a river, and she kissed him on the lips. In the film, this last scene is played for both tenderness and laughs. 'We shot it just over a year ago, in October,' Redmayne recalls. 'It wasn't a balmy day, and the water was very cold. It wasn't exactly romantic. Michelle and I just concentrated on getting our lines right first time, and running out of the water into warm towels.'
The third side of this triangle, of course, was Olivier, and Branagh leapt at the chance of playing this complex man at a key moment in his life. 'I knew about Olivier from his memoirs,' Branagh says. 'At that point in his career, he was almost 50, and I think he felt maybe a little fossilised. He had a glamorous marriage [to Vivien Leigh] and he was treated like royalty in Britain. But I think he wanted to be "cool", as we'd say now. And initially he thought he was going to get that. But then came the feud with Monroe and all the frustrations of working with her. All those things that Olivier believed in – turning up on time, knowing all your lines – were traduced by Marilyn on that film. It almost unmanned him.'
In the end, the film was no one's finest hour. In this laborious, old-fashioned comedy, largely panned by the critics, Monroe plays a saucy American showgirl who is romanced in London by the Prince Regent of Carpathia (played by Olivier with a non-specific middle-European accent) during George V's 1911 coronation. The playwright Terence Rattigan, one of many talents who suddenly looked desperately old-hat in the cultural upheavals of the 1950s, wrote the script from his own play The Sleeping Prince – Vivien Leigh had played the showgirl role on the London stage.
Despite the problems she caused with her erratic behaviour, it is Monroe who walks away with the film. Hers is the only character on screen with any life or zest. Yet the film may now be best remembered as a superb dramatic battlefield for Olivier and Monroe, and a first-rate romantic backdrop for Monroe and Clark.
'I don't think it's hard to identify with Colin in that situation,' Adrian Hodges says. 'Anybody could identify with that fascination with Hollywood and the extraordinary strangeness of becoming close to someone so famous, who patently did need him – at least for a moment or two.
'I really love all the showbiz stuff, the scenes on the film set. But there's only so much you can do before the general audience says, fine, but give us a story. That's where Colin's week with Marilyn comes in. That's the heart and soul of the film.'
Seven years seems a long time between the idea for a film first being mooted and its eventual release, but David Parfitt recalls, 'It wasn't too bad really. Simon Curtis and I went straight to BBC Films and the UK Film Council, who put up the development funds, and we had a screenplay we were happy with after 18 months. Then came the search for finance, and for our Marilyn.'
Simon Curtis insists that Michelle Williams was always the top choice to play Monroe. 'Neither Marilyn nor Olivier are the kinds of parts where you go down a list and eventually you find somebody. These people have to be not only the right age and have a resemblance to their characters, but stunningly good actors as well. Michelle and Ken were both at the top of my list, and I feel so lucky.'
Williams committed to My Week with Marilyn two years before shooting started, and stayed loyal, according to Parfitt. 'We were waiting for her to finish other films, such as Blue Valentine.' Finally the financing for My Week with Marilyn was clinched by Harvey Weinstein, the American producer and studio head, who had snapped up the rights to Blue Valentine and was keen to keep working with Williams. Buying the rights to My Week with Marilyn made that desire a reality.
Weinstein may have bankrolled the film, but it is an utterly British creation. Judi Dench plays the actress Sybil Thorndike, who took kindly to Monroe on set and stood up to Olivier on her behalf. Emma Watson is a young wardrobe mistress on The Prince and the Showgirl, with whom Clark attempts a more conventional romance. Zoë Wanamaker is Paula Strasberg, Monroe's acting coach, whose constant presence on set enraged Olivier. Julia Ormond plays Vivien Leigh, more than a little jealous of Marilyn. Stalwart British actors such as Simon Russell Beale, Philip Jackson, Jim Carter and Derek Jacobi have smaller roles. Redmayne felt almost overwhelmed by the venerable names in the cast. 'Most of them are people I've admired for years. Much of that gaping, wide-eyed look I have in the film wasn't really acting.'
There is a fascinating postscript to Clark's story about The Prince and the Showgirl, an indifferent film that turned out to have a galvanising effect on its two frustrated, unhappy leads. Just before it started shooting, Olivier and Rattigan went to see Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. They were both appalled. But Olivier went back, decided it offered a glimpse of the future and wrote to Osborne asking if he 'had anything for him'. Osborne offered him The Entertainer, the story of a failing middle-aged song-and-dance man, Archie Rice, and an emblem of England's fading glories. Released in 1960, it would be one of the triumphs of Olivier's career.
As for Monroe, her next film was Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder's sublime comedy and the high-water mark of her big-screen appearances. It's as if The Prince and the Showgirl was an unlikely spark that brought two very different personalities together for a while, and set them free to go off in new creative directions. And not just Monroe and Olivier, but Monroe and Clark, too.
'My Week with Marilyn' is out on November 25
For the director Simon Curtis, the social and political background to this gently romantic interlude is as interesting as the main story itself. 'At that time Olivier had become emblematic of a fading Britain. Marilyn was emblematic of an exciting, complicated new America. Arguably, 1956 is the year that Britain finally started to shake off the shadow of the Second World War. Rationing had only just ended. So for me, this is about Marilyn and her glamorous, colourful American entourage arriving in black-and-white England.'
Curtis first approached the producer David Parfitt about a possible film based on the books seven years ago. 'Everyone liked the idea,' Parfitt recalls. But one problem about making a film about Monroe is that she feels so familiar and iconic: what is left to say? She died almost 50 years ago, aged 36, but remains firmly part of the collective consciousness. We think we know everything about her, from her curvaceous frame, that breathy, babyish voice, her sexy shimmy, to her failed marriages and affairs, and her tragic premature death from a drug overdose in 1962.
Adrian Hodges, the film's screenwriter, saw the problem immediately. 'Is there anyone more famous to write about? Princess Diana, possibly. Even people who don't know why they know Marilyn Monroe know her. That's how big she is in the culture. If you'd said to me one day I'd write a film about her, I'd have been amazed, because I wouldn't have known where to start.'
The saving grace for Hodges was that Clark's books about Monroe are snapshots of a short, specific time, which meant he could avoid the cliches and caricatures now associated with the actress. Thus, he says, his script is 'a view of her as a woman of 30, at a crossroads, still close enough to the person she'd been to have contact with reality. She was not quite the fading supernova. I liked the idea that this was before anything was inevitable for her.
'I felt the world could also use a generous view of Marilyn. The film isn't uncritical of her behaviour and it certainly doesn't give her a free pass. It's just that I think there are other things to say about someone who was once a complete person, not just this… thing.'
Michelle Williams also admits to feeling nervous about playing Monroe. 'How could you not be? I'd always been interested in the private Marilyn, the Marilyn before "Marilyn". Even as a young girl, my primary connection wasn't with this larger-than-life personality, but with what was going on underneath.'
As Williams sees the story, 'She was expecting to go to London and make a movie with the most esteemed actor of the time. When she arrived she felt she was being mistreated and laughed at. Olivier… didn't treat her with the kind of attention she was hoping for. She felt she needed allies – and she found one in Colin Clark.'
Although it is Marilyn's name in the film's title, Clark emerges as an equally fascinating individual. He came from a very privileged background; an early scene in the film shows him driving away from the magnificent Saltwood Castle in Kent, where he grew up. (The real castle was used in the film.) His father was the renowned art historian Kenneth Clark, best known as the writer and presenter of the television series Civilisation. Eddie Redmayne found Clark a complex character. 'There's a sense that Colin has come from a life of privilege,' he says, 'but there was something idiosyncratic about him. He went to Eton, but while all his friends were hunting, shooting and fishing types, his father was an art historian – at a time when no one quite knew what a historian was. He was slightly embarrassed about it.
'At one point he became a zookeeper for six months, just because he wanted to. He had a rather glamorous background – with people like Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Margot Fonteyn visiting his parents' home for tea. So he came out of Eton and Oxford with tremendous confidence, but in need of an emotional education.'
Clark littered his diaries with nonchalant accounts of casual sex, both straight and gay. In My Week with Marilyn, though, it is clear he was entranced by the world's best-known actress. The nearest he came to consummating their relationship was when they spent the day together in a chauffeured car, visiting Windsor Castle (where Clark's godfather was the librarian), his old school Eton, and driving through Windsor Great Park where they stripped off to swim in a river, and she kissed him on the lips. In the film, this last scene is played for both tenderness and laughs. 'We shot it just over a year ago, in October,' Redmayne recalls. 'It wasn't a balmy day, and the water was very cold. It wasn't exactly romantic. Michelle and I just concentrated on getting our lines right first time, and running out of the water into warm towels.'
The third side of this triangle, of course, was Olivier, and Branagh leapt at the chance of playing this complex man at a key moment in his life. 'I knew about Olivier from his memoirs,' Branagh says. 'At that point in his career, he was almost 50, and I think he felt maybe a little fossilised. He had a glamorous marriage [to Vivien Leigh] and he was treated like royalty in Britain. But I think he wanted to be "cool", as we'd say now. And initially he thought he was going to get that. But then came the feud with Monroe and all the frustrations of working with her. All those things that Olivier believed in – turning up on time, knowing all your lines – were traduced by Marilyn on that film. It almost unmanned him.'
In the end, the film was no one's finest hour. In this laborious, old-fashioned comedy, largely panned by the critics, Monroe plays a saucy American showgirl who is romanced in London by the Prince Regent of Carpathia (played by Olivier with a non-specific middle-European accent) during George V's 1911 coronation. The playwright Terence Rattigan, one of many talents who suddenly looked desperately old-hat in the cultural upheavals of the 1950s, wrote the script from his own play The Sleeping Prince – Vivien Leigh had played the showgirl role on the London stage.
Despite the problems she caused with her erratic behaviour, it is Monroe who walks away with the film. Hers is the only character on screen with any life or zest. Yet the film may now be best remembered as a superb dramatic battlefield for Olivier and Monroe, and a first-rate romantic backdrop for Monroe and Clark.
'I don't think it's hard to identify with Colin in that situation,' Adrian Hodges says. 'Anybody could identify with that fascination with Hollywood and the extraordinary strangeness of becoming close to someone so famous, who patently did need him – at least for a moment or two.
'I really love all the showbiz stuff, the scenes on the film set. But there's only so much you can do before the general audience says, fine, but give us a story. That's where Colin's week with Marilyn comes in. That's the heart and soul of the film.'
Seven years seems a long time between the idea for a film first being mooted and its eventual release, but David Parfitt recalls, 'It wasn't too bad really. Simon Curtis and I went straight to BBC Films and the UK Film Council, who put up the development funds, and we had a screenplay we were happy with after 18 months. Then came the search for finance, and for our Marilyn.'
Simon Curtis insists that Michelle Williams was always the top choice to play Monroe. 'Neither Marilyn nor Olivier are the kinds of parts where you go down a list and eventually you find somebody. These people have to be not only the right age and have a resemblance to their characters, but stunningly good actors as well. Michelle and Ken were both at the top of my list, and I feel so lucky.'
Williams committed to My Week with Marilyn two years before shooting started, and stayed loyal, according to Parfitt. 'We were waiting for her to finish other films, such as Blue Valentine.' Finally the financing for My Week with Marilyn was clinched by Harvey Weinstein, the American producer and studio head, who had snapped up the rights to Blue Valentine and was keen to keep working with Williams. Buying the rights to My Week with Marilyn made that desire a reality.
Weinstein may have bankrolled the film, but it is an utterly British creation. Judi Dench plays the actress Sybil Thorndike, who took kindly to Monroe on set and stood up to Olivier on her behalf. Emma Watson is a young wardrobe mistress on The Prince and the Showgirl, with whom Clark attempts a more conventional romance. Zoë Wanamaker is Paula Strasberg, Monroe's acting coach, whose constant presence on set enraged Olivier. Julia Ormond plays Vivien Leigh, more than a little jealous of Marilyn. Stalwart British actors such as Simon Russell Beale, Philip Jackson, Jim Carter and Derek Jacobi have smaller roles. Redmayne felt almost overwhelmed by the venerable names in the cast. 'Most of them are people I've admired for years. Much of that gaping, wide-eyed look I have in the film wasn't really acting.'
There is a fascinating postscript to Clark's story about The Prince and the Showgirl, an indifferent film that turned out to have a galvanising effect on its two frustrated, unhappy leads. Just before it started shooting, Olivier and Rattigan went to see Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. They were both appalled. But Olivier went back, decided it offered a glimpse of the future and wrote to Osborne asking if he 'had anything for him'. Osborne offered him The Entertainer, the story of a failing middle-aged song-and-dance man, Archie Rice, and an emblem of England's fading glories. Released in 1960, it would be one of the triumphs of Olivier's career.
As for Monroe, her next film was Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder's sublime comedy and the high-water mark of her big-screen appearances. It's as if The Prince and the Showgirl was an unlikely spark that brought two very different personalities together for a while, and set them free to go off in new creative directions. And not just Monroe and Olivier, but Monroe and Clark, too.
'My Week with Marilyn' is out on November 25