In 1956 Marilyn Monroe set foot on English soil for the first time; she was on honeymoon with her husband Arthur Miller (a celebrated playwright) and at the same time she was to shoot ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’ starring opposite Laurence Olivier.
That same summer, Colin Clark; newly graduated from Oxford obtained a job as a lowly production hand on the same movie set. Forty years later he recounted his experience in a memoir entitled ‘The Prince the Showgirl and Me’. But one week of the account was missing; this film ‘My Week With Marilyn’ recounts that missing week in glorious detail.
The film was never going to be easy to make; with such an icon like Marilyn Monroe everyone has a vision of her and probably an opinion of what she was like. The difficulties between Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl are well documented. He disliked her tardiness, her drug and alcohol fuelled erratic behaviour and her devotion to method acting. The backdrop of difficulties and disappointments provides a better understanding as to why Marilyn and Colin form such an unlikely relationship.
The film gives you a real glimpse into old Hollywood and what celebrity meant at that time. You see Marilyn as a sweet endearing and vulnerable 
person but at the same time someone who was deeply insecure and frantic much of the time. Of course none of this could be portrayed if it wasn’t for Michelle Williams who plays the leading role. Michelle says of the role “To be honest, the part kind of landed in my lap, although I knew immediately that I was going to challenge myself to do it.”
Depending on your age you may know Michelle as the angst ridden teenager she played in the late nineties in Dawson’s Creek. Or perhaps as the Oscar nominated actress in Brokeback Mountain. Michelle tends to be an actress that flies under the radar, but she has made some clever choices – from hard hitting thrillers like Shutter Island to Independent films like Wendy and Lucy. Simon Curtis, the Cranford director who is making his feature film debut with My Week with Marilyn, believed that Williams was “perfect in so many ways. She is one of those actresses that I always want. From Dawson’s Creek onwards, I think she is absolutely marvellous.”
Perhaps on some level Michelle related to the vulnerability felt by Marilyn; being no stranger to tragedy herself or the pressure that being a movie star can bring. Michelle is mother to her six year old daughter Matilda whose father Heath Ledger (herBrokebackMountainco-star) died following an accidental overdose in January 2008. Michelle was subsequently hounded by the paparazzi even though they had split up the previous year.
On playingMonroeshe says “As soon as I said yes to the role, I spent the next six months trying to talk myself out of it because it was just so daunting. I was never really a very good student. I didn’t go to school for a terribly long time. I think I’m making up for it now. I worked so hard. I read all the books. I watched the movies. I was obsessed with her. I woke up with her every morning and I went to bed with her every night, in a way.”
The film adequately demonstrates the pressure Marilyn was under – everyone wanted something from her and yet this is the life she had chosen, the persona she had become and when all is said and done she couldn’t walk away from it.
Michelle sums up the icon very nicely “There’s this incandescence, this mixture, this woman-child. She gave the impression of having the body of a woman but the mind and the heart of an innocent, and that was an intoxicating combination.”
The film is out in UK cinemas from the 25th November 2011 and has a star studded supporting cast – Kenneth Branagh, Dougray Scott, Dominic Cooper, Emma Watson and Dame Judi Dench.
