My Week With Marilyn (15)
- Starring: Emma Watson, Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Dominic Cooper, Dougray Scott, Julia Ormond, Judi Dench, Eddie Redmayne
- Director: Simon Curtis
- Duration: 96 mins
- Year: 2011
In the early summer of 1956, 23 year-old Colin Clark, just down from Oxford and determined to make his way in the film business, worked as a lowly assistant on the set of 'The Prince and the Showgirl'. The film that famously united Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. Nearly 40 years on, his diary account The Prince, the Showgirl and Me was published, but one week was missing, published some years later as My Week with Marilyn. When Arthur Miller leaves England, the coast is clear for Colin to introduce Marilyn to some of the pleasures of British life; an idyllic week in which he escorted a Monroe desperate to get away from her retinue of Hollywood hangers-on and the pressures of work.
Reviews
Alison Rowat's Review
When Larry (Olivier) met Marilyn (Monroe) in 1956 to make The Prince and the Showgirl they got on like cat and dog due to her tardiness and his impatience with her method acting.
Colin Clark, then a lowly third assistant director, befriended Monroe and wrote about it in a memoir. This is the story of the seven days he left out, and what a tale it is. Michelle Williams, makes an eerily accurate Marilyn, while Eddie Redmayne is the kindly Colin.
There are grand turns from Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike and Dougray Scott as Monroe’s husband Arthur Miller, but it’s Kenneth Branagh as dear, dear, Larry who is the real treat here.
It’s all terribly luvvy and hammier than a ham sandwich at times, but it’s sweet, funny and sad all the same.