Television Actors Actresses

My Week With Marilyn

In 1956. The liaison, romantic on the boy’s part, needy on the star’s, was such a pivotal episode in the life of television arts film-maker Clark (son of Sir Kenneth, brother of Tory MP Alan) that he wrote two memoirs about it, the sources of Simon Curtis’s likeable but slender and oddly prim period drama.

The fraughtness stems from Monroe’s crippling lack of confidence and blatant disregard for discipline. When she shows up on the set, if she shows up at all, she either doesn’t know her lines or is so blocked she can’t say them, which renders Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) apoplectic. In that it shows Monroe overcoming her demons with the help of a friend to turn in one of those bizarrely arresting performances (as if she were acting in an empty aquarium), the film is vaguely reminiscent of The King’s Speech is between Monroe (the Method-trained commoner) and Olivier (the king of actors), which unfortunately forces Colin, the nominal protagonist, to the side of the action.

The romance - which coyly leaves one asking “Did they or didn’t they?” - feels a little like a sidebar. Separated for a week from her husband, the dramatist Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), who admits to Olivier that he can’t write around his agitated wife, Monroe takes up with Colin because she needs a non-authoritarian male around. “There’s always a man,” someone ruefully warns him. The shame is that, to follow an illusion, Colin throws over the very real and available wardrobe assistant ( Emma Watson , pictured above left with Redmayne , compellingly angry here) who has fallen for him.

One doubts that many 23-year-old swains, however gallant, could have resisted Monroe’s incandescent allure in the mid-Fifties, not that it translates to sex in any shape or form in this telling. Instead, with Olivier powerless to do anything about it, Colin and Monroe set off in a studio car to go cavorting at Eton, where he was educated and where a current crop of scholars can’t believe their eyes, strolling in the countryside, and skinny-dipping. It's at this juncture that Colin experiences an erection... but no cigar. “Be careful not to get in too deep, son,” cautions Monroe’s minder (the estimably phlegmatic Philip Jackson). At another point on this jaunt, Monroe performs “Marilyn” for a group of servants. Free to act without a bully standing over her, she is wholly natural.