Showing results for "My Week with Marilyn" in All Categories

Like her art, Marilyn Monroe was rooted in paradox: She was a powerful star and a childlike waif; a joyful, irreverent party girl with a deeply spiritual side; a superb friend and a narcissist; a dumb blonde and an intellectual. No previous biographer has recognized - much less attempted to analyze - most of these aspects of her personality. Lois Banner has.

No one looked like her. No one walked like her. No one talked like her. Sexy, yet vulnerable, and unexpectedly talented, Marilyn Monroe was no ordinary screen goddess. But few really knew her. On June 1, 1962—Marilyn's 36th birthday—famed photographer and reporter George Barris visited Marilyn on the set of what would be her final, unfinished, film. For the next six weeks, Barris photographed and interviewed the actress. "Don't believe anything you read about me except this...." she told Barris.

In 1956, 23-year-old Colin Clark began work as a lowly assistant on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, the film that united Sir Laurence Olivier with Marilyn Monroe. The blonde bombshell and the legendary actor were ill suited from the start. Monroe, on honeymoon with her new husband, the celebrated playwright Arthur Miller, was insecure, often late, and heavily medicated on pills. Clark was perceptive in his assessment of what seemed to be going wrong in Monroe's life and became her confidant and ally.