Heat Wave: Michelle Williams is hot stuff as Marilyn

By Baz Bamigboye

Last updated at 10:39 AM on 30th September 2011


How marvellously appropriate that Simon Curtis’s movie My Week With Marilyn has a pre-opening credit sequence with Michelle Williams portraying Marilyn Monroe singing Heat Wave.

She’s wearing a slinky gold lamé gown that shifts as her hips swing. ‘We’re having a heat wave,’ she sings softly. ‘A tropical heat wave, the temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising . . . ’

The Irving Berlin number, which Monroe sang in the movie There’s No Business Like Show Business, goes on to mention something about her anatomy making the mercury jump to 93.

Temperature is rising: Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe in a scene from My Week With Marilyn

Wiggling a come-hither finger at a couple of male dancers, the scene captures Monroe’s heat and allure perfectly. The crazy thing is that, for a couple of seconds, your mouth drops open because you think it might be out-takes of the real Norma Jean.

But it’s all Michelle Williams: the voice, the hair, the pout, the sashay are all part of her sensational interpretation.

When I saw the actress on set last November she told me she wanted to bring to the screen ‘a kind of sensitivity that those who loved her [Monroe] would spend the rest of their lives trying to describe’ - and that’s just what she’s done.

The film’s title alludes to the friendship that developed between Monroe and Colin Clark, an Eton-educated toff hired as an assistant to Laurence Olivier during the making of The Prince And The Showgirl at Pinewood Studios - where My Week was also shot - in the late Fifties.

That wiggle: The slinky gold lame dress shifts as her hips swing

For a short while, Monroe was able to be herself around Clark, and the pair went off on a jolly jaunt, skinny-dipping and visiting Windsor Castle.

It was a brief respite from the private pain Monroe tried to mask.
All that and more comes through in Williams’s portrait.

She not only gives us Monroe, the world-renowned star, but also switches between two other roles: Elsie Marina (the character she plays in The Prince And The Showgirl) and the lost girl who is Norma Jean.

Eddie Redmayne, as Clark, is the glue that holds things together, but the movie is also about the clash of cultures that arises between Williams’s Monroe and Kenneth Branagh’s Olivier.

It’s electrifying watching these two titans (Williams and Branagh are bound to get Oscar nominations) who speak the same language but are unable to communicate.

Monroe envies Olivier’s stature as an actor; he wants some of her stardust to rub off on him (though it would be nice if she was punctual on set, while she was at it).

Branagh’s performance is often hilarious as he spits and splutters over his leading lady’s behaviour. But there’s also something poignant, as the film hints at the insecurities that bedevil even the most confident and successful of people.

Clark’s diaries, upon which Adrian Hodges has based his screenplay, note that soon after Olivier shot The Prince And The Showgirl he was sent John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which not only redefined his career, but British theatre.

Titans: Sir Laurence Olivier and actress Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Prince And The Showgirl. Kenneth Branagh plays Olivier in the new film

Another strand running through Curtis’s gorgeous movie (produced by David Parfitt, Harvey Weinstein and BBC Films) concerns ageing and celebrity.

There’s a heartbreaking moment when Julia Ormond, as Vivien Leigh, remarks she’s 43 and no one, including her husband Olivier, will love her for much longer.

It’s interesting to note that today some of our biggest female movie stars are well into their 40s, if not older - though many still feel the need to hide or deny that.

And then there’s Judi Dench, in a class all by her beautiful self, refusing to get caught up in such nonsense. She portrays Sybil Thorndike, a grand dame then as Judi is now, offering sympathy to the blonde bombshell who couldn’t fathom our quaint ways.

The movie has its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 9 and opens here on November 25.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2043538/Heat-Wave-Michelle-Williams-hot-stuff-Marilyn.html#ixzz1ZVbFVeQo