Here are my notes:
My
Week with Marilyn
UK2011 101
minutes
Director: Simon
Curtis
Starring: Michelle Williams,
Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson and Judi Dench
- Nominated
for Oscars for Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor
(Kenneth Branagh)
- Nominated
for six BAFTAs including Best British Film, Best Actress (Michelle
Williams), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) and Best Supporting Actor
(Kenneth Branagh)
- A
further 14 wins and 26 nominations
“In 1956, Marilyn Monroe
came to Britain to make a movie at Pinewood Studios with Laurence Olivier. This
was the tense and ill-fated light comedy The
Prince and the Showgirl, scripted by Terence Rattigan, a film that became a
legend for the lack of chemistry between its insecure and incompatible stars. One was a sexy, feminine, sensual and
mercurial diva. The other would go on to
make Some Like It Hot. ... My
Week With Marilyn is light fare: it doesn't pretend to offer any great
insight, but it offers a great deal of pleasure and fun, and an unpretentious
homage to a terrible British movie that somehow, behind the scenes, generated a
very tender almost-love story.”
Peter
Bradshaw
Colin Clark (Eddie
Redmayne) is the Third Assistant Director on The Prince and the Showgirl which Marilyn Monroe (Michelle
Williams) is filming in the UK with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) as both
director and leading man. Monroe has
been accompanied to the UK by her husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), but
when he leaves her to return to the US she spends an intimate romantic week
alone with Clark. The film is based on a
memoir that Colin Clark (son of Lord Clark of Civilisation and younger brother of Alan Clark, Conservative MP and
famous diarist) wrote from the diaries that he kept about his time working with
Olivier as a general dogsbody on The
Prince and the Showgirl.
Michelle Williams and
Kenneth Branagh secured both critical praise and award nominations for their performances,
but the film has casting in depth and includes established performers such as
Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), Julia Ormond (as Vivien Leigh) and Zoe
Wanamaker (as Paula Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach) as well as relative
newcomers such Eddie Redmayne (recently seen in Birdsong on TV) and Emma Watson (moving on from her role as
Hermione in the Harry Potter films).
The screenplay is by Adrian
Hodges who has worked extensively in television where, amongst his work, he has
adapted two of Philip Pullman’s Sally
Lockheart novels for TV as well as creating and writing episodes for Primeval and writing episodes for the
BBC remake of Survivors. Simon Curtis as director had worked
extensively in theatre before making his television debut with Cranford. He followed the success of this series with
the widely acclaimed film A Short Stay in
Switzerland, which starred Julie Walters in a true story of a woman who
decided to take her own life in a Dignitas clinic.
Here's the trailer:
