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The World Beyond BetterMost => The Culture Tent => Topic started by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 23, 2011, 09:18:38 am

Title: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 23, 2011, 09:18:38 am


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXfBcz2bLNs[/youtube]



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJRC7HGRn4I&feature[/youtube]



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNeL4Q4JMlA[/youtube]
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Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 23, 2011, 09:26:14 am



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO_vzrLykso&feature[/youtube]



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHqmZOdeYNo&feature[/youtube]
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Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 23, 2011, 09:46:39 am


http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/my_week_with_marilyn_michelle_williams_dazzling_oscar_bid/


“My Week With Marilyn”:
Michelle Williams’ dazzling Oscar bid

The indie star is wondrous, sexy and sweet as
doomed screen goddess Marilyn Monroe in a
lightweight British comedy


By Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Nov 22, 2011 8:00 PM 07:35:25 EST


(http://media.salon.com/2011/11/my-week-with-marilyn-460x307.jpg)
Dougray Scott and Michelle Williams in "My Week with Marilyn"


We’re about halfway through the stagey, enjoyable behind-the-scenes comedy “My Week With Marilyn” when we hear Kenneth Branagh, playing Laurence Olivier, raging about his costar in the 1957 mishmash “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Teaching Marilyn Monroe how to act, sputters Branagh-as-Olivier, is “like teaching Urdu to a badger.” It’s a funny line, albeit loaded with the imperial condescension Sir Larry evidently felt for the American girl from nowheresville who held the whole world in thrall. But as even Olivier would eventually admit, some badgers just know how to communicate, with or without language instruction.

Most of the chatter around “My Week With Marilyn” will inevitably concern Michelle Williams’ magnetic Oscar-bait performance as the off-screen Monroe, and my only two words on that subject are yes and yes. (Yes, she’s wonderful and yes, she’ll probably win, although I’m still pulling for Ellen Barkin or Kirsten Dunst.) But this film adapted from the memoirs of one-time Olivier assistant Colin Clark also does the service of reminding us that Marilyn Monroe was something more than the Kim Kardashian of her day. She drove Olivier nuts precisely because she had no idea what she was doing as an actress and lacked the kind of discipline and work ethic on which theater-trained actors like him relied — and because in scene after scene in that movie, she blew him away.

As we see her here (and by all accounts this is pretty true to life) Monroe could utterly butcher her lines on the first take, space out and suffer a minor panic attack on the second, and then deliver a perfect, funny, sexy, ingratiating reading on the third, the sort of thing that convinced the audience she was on their side, even playing in a sub-mediocre transatlantic comedy opposite a slumming Shakespearean. Playing to the camera like that was simply not something that Olivier, one of the greatest actors in the history of British theater, was capable of doing. As Branagh plays Olivier, he feels superior to Monroe, superior to the material, and generally insulted by the whole experience. Yet he’s also bitterly aware that even amid her apparent terror and incompetence, Monroe can illuminate the frame, leaving him standing there like an item of spare furniture doing an atrocious Dracula accent. (I’m tempted to accuse Branagh of camping it up in this odd, meta-actorly performance — one great Shakespeare actor playing another — except that I’m not sure one can camp up Laurence Olivier quite enough.)

“My Week With Marilyn” is the kind of shtick-laden movie in the British TV mode that delivers all its laughs, and all its grand, declamatory moments, right on schedule. I’m delighted to recommend it, as long as you know what you’re in for: “The King’s Speech” has the subtlety of Chekho in comparison. Everyone in the supporting cast seems to have worked really hard on his or her accent and is overly proud to show it off, perhaps to conceal that every single aspect of the story is both familiar and predictable. Even when you’ve got Americans playing Americans (Zoë Wanamaker as Monroe’s acting coach, Paula Strasberg) or Brits playing Brits (Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s wife at the time) there’s a thick, greasy coating of histrionics. And then you get a whole parade of overconfident British actors doing exaggerated Noo Yawk accents that suggest Rodney Dangerfield topped with gefilte fish: Toby Jones as Monroe’s agent, Arthur Jacobs; Dominic Cooper as photographer-turned-producer Milton Greene; and Dougray Scott, doing a splendid Arthur Miller as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Sure, this is a British production, and that’s great. But they couldn’t get an actual New York actor to play Arthur freakin’ Miller?

Against that backdrop we get the thoroughly winning, borderline-apocryphal fable of the almost-romance that developed during the summer 1956 shoot of “Showgirl” between Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a wide-eyed, upper-crust college grad who had latched onto Olivier, and the Western world’s most famous star. According to Vivien Leigh, Olivier arrived on set as both star and director expecting to seduce Monroe, but their relationship turned sour almost immediately. Monroe hid in her dressing room or her rented Surrey mansion, Olivier fumed, and the handsome, gawky Clark was deputized to be their go-between. There’s really no one left alive to testify to the intimate details of Clark’s relationship with Monroe, but by his account he served mainly as her pal and confidant after Miller fled back to America. Were they lovers? The film doesn’t directly answer that, and I get the feeling that the answer depends on what you think the question means.

I’m a huge admirer of Michelle Williams, but I’m used to seeing her play indie-film characters who sleep in their cars or brave the Oregon Trail. In the abstract I wouldn’t have assumed she had either the physicality or the luminosity to pull off Marilyn Monroe. But from her thoroughly delectable opening number, her performance is relaxed, natural and utterly captivating, capturing Monroe’s precise blend of innocence and eroticism. You could say that the character Williams develops is rootless and uncentered, but one suspects that was true of Marilyn in real life, vacillating between the public sex-symbol persona that threatened to swallow her and the uncertain girl from a messed-up family who was plagued by anxieties and the threat of mental illness.

You can see why she liked Clark, who in Redmayne’s portrayal is supremely smitten, utterly guileless and thoroughly English, three things Arthur Miller — who was clearly having second thoughts about his celebrity spouse — certainly was not. She goes skinny-dipping in a pond at Oxford, in blatant violation of that ancient establishment’s rules, and thrills the university’s service workers by descending a staircase in full Marilyn mode. “Shall I be her?” she purrs to Colin, before striking poses and blowing kisses. As the world would soon find out, the performance of being Marilyn Monroe was too much for her. The performance of being a charming English boy’s pretend girlfriend for a week may have been a welcome respite, or at least it’s nice to think so.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 23, 2011, 10:04:00 am



(http://www.neontommy.com/sites/default/files/users/user321/my-week-with-marilyn-poster.jpg)          (http://www.movieposterdb.com/posters/10_03/1957/50861/l_50861_cc99416f.jpg).


Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 23, 2011, 04:10:54 pm




http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/movies/my-week-with-marilyn-with-michelle-williams-review.html


(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo152x23.gif)
Movie Review
My Week With Marilyn (2011)
Glamorous Sex Goddess,
Longing to Be Human


By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: November 22, 2011


(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/11/22/movies/myweek-span/myweek-span-articleLarge.jpg)
Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark, Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller and Michelle Williams as
Marilyn Monroe in "My Week With Marilyn."



In 1976, the year that Marilyn Monroe would have turned 50, Larry McMurtry wrote that she “is right in there with our major ghosts: Hemingway, the Kennedy brothers — people who finished with American life before America had time to finish with them.” Almost a half-century after her death, the world, or at least its necrophiliac fantasists, still haven’t finished with Monroe and try to resurrect her again and again in movies, books, songs and glamour layouts featuring dewy and ruined ingénues. Maybe it’s because it’s so difficult to imagine her as Old Marilyn that she has become a Ghost of Hollywood Past, a phantom that periodically materializes to show us things that have been.

The latest attempt at resurrection occurs in “My Week With Marilyn,” with Michelle Williams as the Ghost. The movie is largely based on a slim 2000 book that a British documentary filmmaker, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne, in a role of many smiles and little depth), claimed was a true account of an intimate interlude he spent with Monroe in 1956 while they were making “The Prince and the Showgirl.” At the time Monroe was newly married to Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and hoped that the film, based on a Terence Rattigan play, would help her move past sexpot roles. But the shoot turned into a clash of egos and cultures that threw her, leading her co-star and director, Laurence Olivier, to damn her as “the stupidest, most self-indulgent little tart I’ve ever come across.”

This is Sir Larry the Cruel, an assessment cemented by the miscast Kenneth Branagh’s intermittently amusing, unctuous take on Olivier as a pitifully vain, insensitive clod. Those familiar with Olivier, who was 49 when he made “Showgirl” and still strikingly handsome, may be distracted by the physical differences between him and Branagh, whose soft face registers as a blur compared with Olivier’s sculptured solidity. Branagh makes up for this disparity somewhat with his crisp, at times clipped, enunciation and a physical performance that gives Olivier enough vitality so that when, early in, the character sweeps into his production office with his wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond, a wan placeholder for the original), he dazzles Clark and jolts this slow-stirring movie awake.

Clark, the son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, decided at 23, as he put it, to run away to the circus by working in the movies, an easy enough goal because his parents were friends with Olivier and Leigh. He became a glorified gofer on “Showgirl” (officially, its third assistant director), a position that involved managing Monroe, who during the shoot soon went from bad to worse, from late to missing in action. Her already strained marriage was one reason; Olivier was another. “Just be sexy,” he told Monroe, “isn’t that what you do?” No wonder she misbehaved: The man she idolized as the world’s greatest actor — and whom her production company hired — was a chauvinist bum.

He didn’t get Monroe, and she is similarly out of the grasp of this movie. Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that’s almost enough. She’s too thin for the role, more colorlessly complected than creamy, but she whispers and wobbles nicely. (The costumes hug her tight, but wrongly round out her breasts, which should thrust like rockets ready for liftoff.)

The problem isn’t Ms. Williams or the serviceable work of the director Simon Curtis, but a script by Adrian Hodges that hews faithfully to Clark’s clichés. Instead of the complex woman familiar from the better books about her, the film offers a catalog of Monroe stereotypes: child, woman, smiling exhibitionist, shrieking neurotic, the barefooted free spirit and, lamentably, the martyr teetering in heels toward her doom.

The tragic Monroe is obviously dramatic, but the intimations of disaster don’t fit a movie that works so hard to be breezily, easily likable. Everything on screen looks good and period-appropriate, if also too manicured, as if the past had been digitally spruced up. Mr. Curtis, who has long directed for television (his credits include the 1999 BBC production of “David Copperfield”), here tends to arrange everything in the frame neatly, often by putting people and other focal points dead center. This isn’t uncommon in comedy, where such centeredness helps build tension as you wait for comic anarchists to wreck a meticulously organized world. In “My Week With Marilyn,” this visual approach adds nothing and comes across as generic, as do as the jerky, handheld newsreel shots and popping photo bulbs.

Mr. Curtis enlivens the movie with music, busyness and Zoe Wanamaker’s darkly comic, toadying turn as Monroe’s acting coach, Paula Strasberg, as well as, always, the promise of the real Monroe. (Emma Watson has a thankless part as a diversion for Clark.) Mr. Curtis’s most unwise filmmaking move, however, is to put Ms. Williams continually into familiar Monroe poses and quote her famous photos and films — nude Marilyn, tousled Marilyn, singing Marilyn — a strategy that undermines his efforts to turn the idol into a person. He shows that Monroe is aware enough of her image that she knows — with a wink, a smile, a shake and a shimmy — how to turn her persona on for public consumption, but he too can’t escape wanting and always returning to that Marilyn Monroe.

“Shall I be her?” she asks Clark, who, like this film, would like nothing better.

“My Week With Marilyn” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Foul language, drug and alcohol abuse and discreet female nudity.


MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.


Directed by Simon Curtis; written by Adrian Hodges, based on the diaries of Colin Clark, “The Prince, the Showgirl and Me” and “My Week With Marilyn”; director of photography, Ben Smithard; edited by Adam Recht; music by Conrad Pope, with “Marilyn’s Theme” by Alexandre Desplat, piano solos by Lang Lang; production design by Donal Woods; costumes by Jill Taylor; produced by David Parfitt and Harvey Weinstein; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes.

WITH: Michelle Williams (Marilyn Monroe), Kenneth Branagh (Laurence Olivier), Eddie Redmayne (Colin Clark), Dominic Cooper (Milton Greene), Philip Jackson (Roger Smith), Derek Jacobi (Owen Morshead), Toby Jones (Arthur Jacobs), Michael Kitchen (Hugh Perceval), Julia Ormond (Vivien Leigh), Simon Russell Beale (Cotes-Preedy), Dougray Scott (Arthur Miller), Zoe Wanamaker (Paula Strasberg), Emma Watson (Lucy) and Judi Dench (Sybil Thorndike).
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 26, 2011, 05:04:09 pm


Interesting...the interview was in a restaurant on 49th and Lex, a corner I walk by every day...you certainly never know who you might meet...!


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/fashion/michelle-williams-in-an-unfamiliar-role-the-star.html?pagewanted=all


(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo152x23.gif)
Main Course
For Michelle Williams,
an Unfamiliar Role: The Star

By CATHY HORYN
Published: November 25, 2011


(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/11/27/fashion/27MAINCOURSE_SPAN/27MAINCOURSE_SPAN-articleLarge.jpg)


HERE is 45 minutes in my life. Actually, 58 minutes 50 seconds, according to the counter on my tape recorder when I finish my conversation with the actress Michelle Williams in the bar of the Bull and Bear Steakhouse in the Waldorf-Astoria, and her publicist, a harried-looking woman named Cari, whisks her away. A bottle of red wine sits unfinished on the table. I pay the check for my $30 hamburger — she wanted only cocktail nuts — and for the glass of wine I ordered while I was waiting for her, and my thoughts skip a beat, releasing me from the scene. ...

She came across the bar toward the corner table and stuck out her hand: “Hi, I’m Michelle.” She’d come from a room upstairs, where she was doing interviews for “My Week With Marilyn,” a Weinstein production set in England in 1956 when Marilyn Monroe was making “The Prince and the Showgirl” with Laurence Olivier.

Ms. Williams, her hair restored to a pixie cut after Marilyn’s goddess curls, did not remove her tweed coat, and it gaped at the neck when she sat down, making her look even smaller than she is. She shook her head when a waiter asked if she wanted something.

“I would have a glass of wine but I’ll fall asleep,” she said with a light laugh. “I’m usually a partaker.”

She had arrived that morning from Detroit, where she has been filming “Oz: The Great and Powerful” and living in the suburbs with her 6-year-old daughter, Matilda, the child she had with the actor Heath Ledger. She got home from the set at 3 a.m.

“I don’t know when I’ve ever been busier than I am now,” she said. “It’s really taken me by surprise.”

“More than the publicity for “Brokeback Mountain”? I asked.

She nodded. “I’ve always had someone to do it with. When we did “Brokeback,” pretty much everything I did was with Heath.” For “Blue Valentine,” she was with Ryan Gosling. “So I haven’t had the experience of being the only person in the conversation.”

“You mean being the star?”

She pulled a face and laughed. “I don’t like to put it that way.”

I had two reasons for wanting to talk to Ms. Williams. First, it’s very clear in “Marilyn” that she gives a star performance. She does not so much portray Monroe as project the legend’s thrilling, and toxic, essence. At 31, Ms. Williams has played a string of misery types — Alma in “Brokeback,” Wendy in the enchanting “Wendy and Lucy,” Cindy in “Blue Valentine.” “Marilyn” breaks that pattern, maybe once and for all.

Second, I was interested in a remark she once made about her decision at 15 to be emancipated from her parents. She said, “I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.” Although I wondered why she thought she was capable of making good decisions, it didn’t strike me as rash. On the contrary, she seemed to know what she wanted. And I suspected she knew that, as well, when she became involved with Mr. Ledger and had a child. (He died in 2008.) She can take care of herself.

Ms. Williams sets up home wherever she is working, enrolling her daughter in a local school and traveling with a sitter. It makes it easier, she said, than commuting to their home in upstate New York.

“It’s hello and goodbye in circles when you live that kind of life,” she said, adding in a false contralto, “ ‘Oh, no, we forgot bunny!’ And I think my daughter knows now that our life is split in two. Half of the year is spent with Mommy working and the other is spent with no work in sight.”

“Can you feel part of a community?” I ask.

“You know who makes that happen is my daughter,” she said. “She is remarkably outgoing, engaging, confident. Because of her we wind up making friends wherever we go. We just got a dog. We were at the park and Matilda went up to another family with a dog and started chatting away. Last Tuesday, we had dinner at their house. She’s the social glue.”

A waiter brought a bottle of wine, a gift to her from the producer Harvey Weinstein. Ms. Williams decided to have a glass. “Here I am drinking wine,” she said. “Surprise, surprise.”

I told her I was curious about the remark she had made about her freedom, and whether she believed she had lost anything in the bargain, like a proper education.

“Yes, I do,” she said. “One of the big delights of my life right now is working with James Franco, who hasn’t lost anything. He’s a perpetual student who is now becoming a teacher. I just kind of poke him all day and say, ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘How would you dissect that poem?’ Whatever education I got was from experience and reading. But I also realize I wouldn’t pass my friend’s sixth-grade class. Wow.”

I asked, “So was it teenage rebellion that made you feel that way or were you wise beyond your years?”

She shrugged. “It could have been both. Listen, I’ve always been very headstrong. I did find my direction at an early age. But mixed in there was — I mean, how much sense of the world can you really have at 15? Mixed in was some brashness and naïveté about real danger. I do consider myself lucky that whatever I brushed up against didn’t stick.”

Many years ago I interviewed a well-known actor who, though a year away from winning an Academy Award, was at the time in a trough of bad-guy roles. When I asked why he wasn’t making better pictures, he replied, “Because those are the roles I was offered.” I repeated the comment to Ms. Williams.

“I concur,” she said. “There isn’t something out there that I’ve — ” She paused. “It was this or dreck. This is what has come to me. It takes one person to say, “I see her a little differently.”

Certainly Simon Curtis, the director of “Marilyn,” saw her as no one else has. She said: “I read the script. I think it came as an offer — which, my God, it’s really good to live in that world. Immediately I knew I wanted the part.”

Given that it’s such a departure, I wondered what she thought about her performance.

“Well, I felt like I made a bet with myself and won,” she said in a soft voice that sounded like Marilyn’s.

“But it’s such a glamorous part.”

“It’s a jump.”

“And star making.”

“You said that dirty word again,” she said, and laughed.

After a moment she said, “I really surprised myself. You know that scene in ‘Star Wars’? Luke and Solo — I don’t even know their names — are about to be squashed in that thing.” She looked at my son, Jacob, who had joined us. “You know that thing?”

“A trash compactor,” he said drowsily.

She nodded. “That’s what I felt like every day on the set. Like I was being pressed up against the wall of my own abilities.”

Cari the publicist was hovering and I said to Ms. Williams, “One last question.”

“Uh-oh!”

I said I was curious about a “Dateline” interview in which she invoked Joan Didion’s line about a “year of magical thinking” to describe Mr. Ledger’s death. She said she was in a way sad to be moving further and further away from it. I wondered: is that age or did she lack the tools at the time to comprehend everything?

“I think it’s just time away from the event of the thing,” she said, catching herself. “No, event is the wrong word — from the impact of the thing. There’s sort of a ripple effect. Then when you get too far away you start to get really scared.”

“That you’ll forget.”

She said, no, that some things were impossible to forget.

“But you don’t seem to carry that dragline,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” she said and then smiled. “Why don’t I?”



Also posted in the Chez Tremblay thread: Michelle Michelle Michelle:
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,6778.msg623066/topicseen.html#msg623066
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: louisev on November 27, 2011, 09:50:54 am
Fascinating interview.  It does seem, though, that though we have lost Heath, we now have the growing delight in Michelle Williams' burgeoning career.  And she's brave to bring Matilda with her instead of the Hollywood starlet mom thing which has warped so many second generation actors and actresses.

anyone seen this yet?



Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: southendmd on November 27, 2011, 11:00:50 pm
anyone seen this yet?

Yes!  Lynne and I saw it tonight.  

In one scene between Marilyn and Colin Clark, he says to her--I'm paraphrasing--"Sir Laurence is a serious actor trying to be a star; you're a star trying to be a serious actress.  I'm afraid this film will accomplish neither."  

I'm not sure this film accomplished much either.  

Maybe because I kept seeing Michelle and not Marilyn, except for a few moments.  Maybe because this film is so damned boring.  Michelle is fine, but not great, I'm afraid.  I don't see Oscar.  Honestly, I liked her better as Coco in "I'm Not There".  She does her own singing, however, mostly in scenes irrelevant to the story, seemingly just tacked on.  

The kid who plays Colin--Eddie Redmayne--is just ok.  He's all freckles and big green eyes and full lips and anachronistic blender-blown hair.  And very little expression.  After all, it's supposed to be "his" film, a young man's fantasy-come-true, and even he seems bored.  

Judi Dench seems to be everywhere these days.  She starts out promising as a sympathetic Dame Sybil Thorndike, but the film soon abandons her.  

I hate to say it, but Kenneth Branagh was the best thing here.  While he doesn't much look like Sir Larry, he nails the voice, the pomposity, and the thin-lipped exasperation.  Sir Larry both starred in and directed "The Prince and the Showgirl"; check it out on youtube--it's completely unwatchable.  

The exceedingly annoying music tries to push and pull the plot along, but sounds like a generic Disney soundtrack.

The credits are keen to tell us it's a true story.  Maybe.  It's not particularly entertaining and could have used a little--more?--fiction to juice it up.  

My advice:  listen to "A Candle in the Wind"--it's more satisfying.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 28, 2011, 12:11:21 am



Sir Larry both starred in and directed "The Prince and the Showgirl"; check it out on youtube--it's completely unwatchable.


Uh-oh.

I first saw "The Prince and the Showgirl" many, many years ago--and adored it! Everytime I would see it (and THAT'S a long, long time ago I had a television in the house!) I would see it again.

Oops! Not saying anything about MY sense or taste, I guess!!

Ha!

 ::) ::)
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: southendmd on November 28, 2011, 12:53:42 am

Uh-oh.

I first saw "The Prince and the Showgirl" many, many years ago--and adored it! Everytime I would see it (and THAT'S a long, long time ago I had a television in the house!) I would see it again.

Oops! Not saying anything about MY sense or taste, I guess!!

Ha!

 ::) ::)


John, your taste is impeccable, as always.  Poor loutish me couldn't stand the endlessly silly accents. 
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: ifyoucantfixit on November 28, 2011, 07:17:49 am


  Although very telling of the movie, I hate that it was such a bore.  I truly wanted to see it.  Disappointing.  I was pulling for it.`   :-\
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: southendmd on November 28, 2011, 09:40:45 am

  Although very telling of the movie, I hate that it was such a bore.  I truly wanted to see it.  Disappointing.  I was pulling for it.`   :-\

Truth be told, Janice, I'm a grumpy old movie-goer.  I'd encourage you to read other reviews before you decide.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 28, 2011, 08:14:38 pm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2054116/Marilyn-Monroe-Colin-Clark-recalls-relationship-Hollywood-legend.html



My week with Marilyn Monroe:
A writer recalls his relationship
with the troubled Hollywood legend


By Colin Clark
Last updated at 8:00 PM on 29th October 2011



In 1956, 23-year-old Colin Clark got a job working on The Prince and the Showgirl,  the film that disastrously united Laurence Olivier with Marilyn Monroe. Here, in an extract from his memoir My Week With Marilyn,  which has been made into a film starring Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh, he reveals how he ended up sharing a bed with the troubled Hollywood star

                                                   (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E3E63DE00000578-577_87x98.jpg)
(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E096DEE00000578-217_634x392.jpg)
Marilyn lounges on a sofa in The Prince and the Showgirl


In the summer of 1956 I worked on the set of a film starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe.

I had just finished university and was only there because my parents were friends of Olivier and his then wife, Vivien Leigh.

Filming on The Prince and the Showgirl  went badly from the beginning. Olivier, the best-known classical actor of his generation, patronised Monroe – who before then had played only strippers and chorus girls – and treated her like a dumb blonde. Monroe’s new husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, dealt with her like a difficult child, and Milton Greene (her business partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions) was desperate to retain control of ‘his’ star by giving her prescription drugs. But Monroe was determined to prove that she could act.

From my first day as third assistant director I kept a journal that was later published as The Prince, the Showgirl and Me.  But nine days during the middle of filming were missing from my account. During those days something happened that was impossible to include in my normal entries. I could not have written this account while Marilyn was alive. It is a tribute to someone who changed my life, and whose own I only wish I could have saved.


TUESDAY 11 SEPTEMBER 1956

I’ve met all sorts of famous people, but Marilyn is different. Her aura is incredibly strong and in the flesh is almost more than one can take. When I am with her my eyes don’t want to leave her. It is a feeling one could easily confuse with love. No wonder she has so many fans and spends most of her time shut up at home. She seems frightened. I know I must not add to those persecuting her, but it is my job to assist her and I can’t resist being in her orbit.



(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E0968F100000578-669_306x282.jpg)     (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E096E8D00000578-634_306x282.jpg)
From left: Laurence Olivier and Marilyn  Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl;  Marilyn at the
film’s premiere in London in June 1957




(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E096C6200000578-705_306x423.jpg)     (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E096C6C00000578-437_306x423.jpg)
From left: Marilyn and Laurence at a press conference at the Savoy Hotel, 1956; with her husband
Arthur Miller in London, October 1956




WEDNESDAY 12 SEPTEMBER

Though Marilyn never arrived at the studio on time, Olivier was always there at seven o’clock sharp. Just before lunch, to everyone’s surprise, Marilyn did show up, but by four o’clock that afternoon she was even more distressed than usual. Olivier decided to call it a day and when I went to his dressing room he was angrily discussing with Milton Greene why Marilyn was so upset.

‘Colin,’ said Olivier, ‘go across to Miss Monroe’s suite and ask her very politely whether she intends to come to work tomorrow.’

*   *   *   *   *

‘Colin,’ Marilyn’s voice was no more than a whisper, ‘what is your job on the picture?’

‘I’m what they call a “gofer”. Anyone can boss me around.’

‘Are you a spy for Sir Laurence? I always see you round him.’

‘I’m not a spy but it’s my job to report anything that will help his movie get made. He’s sent me to see if you are coming to work tomorrow.’

‘Mr Miller is flying to Paris tomorrow so I’ll stay home to see him.’

‘Of course, Miss Monroe.’

There was a long pause.

‘Colin, whose side are you on?’

‘Oh, yours, Miss Monroe. I promise you I’m on your side and always will be.’


THURSDAY 13 SEPTEMBER

The phone in the studio rang. Milton happened to be standing next to it and picked it up. His face crumpled a little when he told me, ‘It’s for you.’

It was Roger, Marilyn’s bodyguard: ‘Miss Monroe wants you to visit this evening.’

‘Me? Why me?’

Milton exploded from across the room, ‘What is my star doing phoning my third assistant director?’

Marilyn came on the line, ‘See you later, Colin. OK?’

*   *   *   *   *

‘Come on, Colin,’ Marilyn laughed, ‘let’s have some dinner. I’m starved. Or are you meant to be with somebody else? There’s not a Mrs Colin is there, waiting for you at home?’

I looked at her across the table and for the first time realised what was going on. Marilyn was lonely. She needed someone to talk to, someone who didn’t expect her to be clever or sexy, but just to be whatever she felt she wanted to be.


FRIDAY 14 SEPTEMBER

As soon as we broke for lunch, Milton Greene was waiting for me: ‘Colin, I must talk to you very seriously. I had a call from Arthur Miller in Paris. He called Marilyn late last night and when he asked her why she took so long to answer the phone she said she had been saying goodbye to you. What were you doing there?’

‘I wasn’t doing anything!’

‘Colin, please don’t go over to see Marilyn again. Or even talk to her without telling me. I’m going to have dinner with her this evening and I’ll explain the situation to her. She told us that she might see you again tonight, and clearly that must not happen. OK?’

It had been fun while it lasted but I didn’t want to lose my job. Nothing had happened, but I felt desperately sorry for Marilyn. She was trapped by her own fame.


SATURDAY 15 SEPTEMBER

Around lunchtime I heard the noise of a car on the gravel drive outside my house. It was Roger – he’d come to take me out to lunch.

‘Where to?’ I asked, climbing into the front seat.

‘Just shut the door, would you?’ He scrunched into first gear.

‘Surpri-hise!’ Marilyn’s blonde head suddenly erupted in the rear-view mirror. ‘Roger and I thought we’d surprise you. I want to go to Windsor Great Park. Aren’t you pleased? I don’t like being on my own in the back. Come and join me.’

This was all going much too fast for me. It was incredibly exhilarating to be in the back seat of a car with Marilyn Monroe, but what would happen next? How could I go back to working on the film?


SUNDAY 16 SEPTEMBER

‘Well, well. Who’s been a naughty boy, then?’

I ignored the innuendo.

‘What did you two do together, exactly?’

‘We went to Windsor Great Park and had lunch.’ I left out that we’d been swimming in the Thames and Marilyn had kissed me full on the lips.

‘Colin,’ Milton Greene said, ‘I’m not mad at you. I just want to give you a word of advice. I’ve known Marilyn a long time and I understand her. I fell in love with her just like you are. The trouble is that Marilyn has a romance with anybody who happens to take her fancy. But it’s a mistake to fall in love with her. She’ll only break your heart.’



(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E8E621300000578-395_306x423.jpg)     (http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/10/27/article-2054116-0E8E626E00000578-28_306x423.jpg)
Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier, and Michelle Williams and Eddie Redmayne as Marilyn
and Colin Clark in the film My Week With Marilyn,  which will be released next month



MONDAY 17 SEPTEMBER

‘Marilyn? It’s me. Are you awake?’ Silence.

‘Marilyn. Wake up. It’s Colin. I’ve come to see if you’re all right.’ Silence.

I’d been called to Marilyn’s house by Roger and her assistant. They were worried she’d taken too many pills when she wouldn’t answer the door or respond. I decided there was nothing for it but to climb through the bedroom window.

‘I’m so sorry, Marilyn, I just wanted to make sure you were OK.’

‘Hi, Colin. I thought you’d come. Get in with me.’

‘Marilyn, everyone in the house is very worried, they thought you might be ill.’

I remembered Roger outside the locked bedroom door. ‘What’s going on? Is Miss Monroe all right?’ he whispered.

‘Marilyn’s fine, she’s just asleep. Tell everyone to go to bed. I’ll stay with her and sleep on the sofa. Marilyn’s asked me to stay so I’ll stay.’

By the time I got back to the bed Marilyn was asleep. I suddenly felt very tired myself. Certainly I could not take advantage of a sleeping Marilyn Monroe but half of her huge bed was empty and my eyelids were beginning to droop. Slowly, I lay down on the satin sheets, and fell fast asleep.

*   *   *   *   *

‘Colin! What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.’

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you. Everyone was worried that you might need a doctor and they said they’d heard you call my name…’

‘I am fine, Colin, especially when I am with you. I don’t want to see a doctor. They’re always telling me to explore my past.’

I leaned across her. ‘I don’t believe in exploring the past. I believe in exploring the future.’

There was a long pause.

‘What is going to happen next?’

‘You mean between us?’

‘Oh, no,’ I leaned back quickly. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘Do you love me, Colin?’

How is it that beautiful women can throw me completely off balance just when I think I am in control? Every time Marilyn looked at me I seemed to lose my grip on reality. I was certainly at her mercy, but was it love?

‘Yes, I love you,’ I said desperately, ‘but I love you like I love the wind, or the waves. I wouldn’t know how to love you as a person as I’d want to possess you. But I could never dream of possessing you. You are like a beautiful force of nature, forever out of reach.’

‘But I don’t want to be out of reach. I want to be touched. I want to be hugged. I want to be loved like an ordinary girl. What’s wrong with that?’

Marilyn sighed. Suddenly she looked very tired. I knew that I should tiptoe away and let her go back to sleep, but I could only gaze at this beautiful creature who seemed so innocent and yet wielded so much power.

‘Colin,’ she whispered, ‘I have to tell you something. There is a part of me that is very ugly. Something which comes from being so ambitious, I guess. Something to do with all the things I’ve done. I’ve slept with too many men and I’ve been unfaithful so often I couldn’t remember. But now I want people to respect me and to be faithful to me. I want to find someone to love me – ugliness and beauty and all. But people only see the glamour and fall in love with that, and then when they see the ugly side they run away. Don’t go away, Colin. I can’t stand it if you go too.’

‘All right, I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘On one condition – that you come into the studio on time tomorrow, surprise everybody, and show them you’re a great star. We’ll set the alarm for seven. That gives us four hours of sleep.’

‘Four hours! Aren’t we going to make love? Will that give us enough time?’

‘No! Oh, Marilyn, you are naughty.’

She turned off the light and lay down behind me. I could feel her stretching out towards the back of my neck, until her body ran the whole length of mine. I breathed out at last. ‘Goodnight,’ I said.

‘Sleep well.’

‘Mmmm,’ she said. ‘I will.’


TUESDAY 18 SEPTEMBER

The next thing I knew, an alarm clock was going off on the other side of the bed and sunlight was streaming into the room. To my amazement I could hear Marilyn rehearsing her lines in the bathroom.

*   *   *   *   *

It was not until she was back in her dressing room at the end of the day that I got a chance to spend a moment alone with her.

‘You were magnificent! You showed them all!’

‘I was scared. Will you come by again this evening? Please? After supper.’

I knew I was on thin ice with Greene and Olivier, but I could not resist those eyes. ‘OK. But I’ve got no excuse to spend the night this time.’

*   *   *   *   *

‘Colin! Colin!’ she cried.

I sat bolt upright in the darkness of her bedroom later that night and fumbled for the light.

‘Oh it hurts. The baby! I’m going to lose the baby.’

‘What baby?’

‘It was for Arthur. It was going to be a surprise. Then he would see that I could be a real wife and a real mother.’

Another spasm gripped Marilyn’s stomach. She was clearly in terrible pain.

*   *   *   *   *

‘It’s true,’ the doctor said. ‘She was pregnant. Not now, of course…’

The fairy story had ended, as dramatically as it had begun.


WEDNESDAY 19 SEPTEMBER

As I drove over to her house the next day I knew exactly what I had to say. ‘I’m sorry darling, but the time has come to say goodbye. Mr Miller is coming back this afternoon and though we both know we did nothing wrong, he might find that very hard to understand. He worships you, just as I do.’


POSTSCRIPT

And so it was over. A brief flirtation between a young man and a beautiful married woman, who was as innocent as she was mature.

After Marilyn went back to America I never spoke to her again – but I did hear from her once. In 1961 I received a message that she’d tried to call me.

When I got the message, I hesitated. I was not sure that I could handle a distraught Marilyn. I knew I would not be able to help her.

In the end I did call, but no one answered and I am ashamed to say I was relieved. It was not that I had abandoned her, certainly not in my heart. It was just that by now I knew nobody could help her.

Poor Marilyn. Time had run out.

*   *   *   *   *

Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home in Los Angeles in August 1962 aged 36. The autopsy recorded a verdict of death by ‘acute barbiturate poisoning’ resulting from ‘probable suicide’.


Click here for an exclusive audio clip from My Week With Marilyn  by Colin Clark, read by Eddie Redmayne
You can also listen to an exclusive interview with Eddie Redmayne

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2054116/Marilyn-Monroe-Colin-Clark-recalls-relationship-Hollywood-legend.html


The secret diarist

Colin Clark was the younger brother of the well-known diarist and MP Alan Clark, and younger son of art historian Kenneth, Lord Clark of Civilisation  fame. His first book, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me was published to great acclaim in 1995 and My Week with Marilyn f ollowed five years later. After The Prince and the Showgirl,  Clark became personal assistant to Laurence Olivier and then had a career producing and directing arts documentaries. He was married three times and had one son. He died in 2002.

My Week With Marilyn  will be republished by HarperCollins on Tuesday, price £8.99 (also available as an e-book, £4.49, and audio download read by Eddie Redmayne, £13.99; for an exclusive audio clip go to you.co.uk (http://you.co.uk)). To buy a copy of the book for £7.99 call the YOU Bookshop on 0843 382 1111 or visit you-bookshop.co.uk (http://you-bookshop.co.uk)

The film will be in cinemas nationwide on 25 November.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: louisev on November 29, 2011, 01:34:32 am
John, your taste is impeccable, as always.  Poor loutish me couldn't stand the endlessly silly accents. 

that's the Transatlantic Sound there, Paul.  The accent that's half Brit and half American and it's revolting!l.  I'll see it on video after it wins 8 Oscars.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 29, 2011, 08:04:35 am



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_P2FFIVV8A&feature=relmfu[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c27D3HPG8Mo&feature=relmfu[/youtube]


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzwG7ZTaqYA&feature=relmfu[/youtube]
.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 29, 2011, 08:43:12 am


(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Laurence_Olivier_and_Marilyn_Monroe_in_The_Prince_and_the_Showgirl_trailer_2.jpg)



(....)

Bus Stop was followed by The Prince and the Showgirl directed by Laurence Olivier, who also co-starred. Prior to filming, Olivier praised Monroe as "a brilliant comedienne, which to me means she is also an extremely skilled actress". During filming in England he resented Monroe's dependence on her drama coach, Paula Strasberg, regarding Strasberg as a fraud whose only talent was the ability to "butter Marilyn up". He recalled his attempts at explaining a scene to Monroe, only to hear Strasberg interject, "Honey — just think of Coca-Cola and Frank Sinatra." Olivier later commented that in the film "Marilyn was quite wonderful, the best of all." Monroe's performance was hailed by critics, especially in Europe, where she won the David di Donatello, the Italian equivalent of the Academy Awards, as well as the French Crystal Star Award. She was also nominated for a BAFTA. It was more than a year before Monroe began her next film. During her hiatus, she summered with Miller in Amagansett, New York. She suffered a miscarriage on August 1, 1957.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 29, 2011, 09:00:53 am


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe

(....)

Politics
 
In Monroe's last interview she pleaded with a reporter to end the article with the following quote: "What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers. Please don’t make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe."
 
Monroe was friends with Ella Fitzgerald and helped Ella in her career. Ella Fitzgerald later recounted, "I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt...it was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the ’50s. She personally called the owner of the club, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. She told him – and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status – that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again. She was an unusual woman – a little ahead of her times. And she didn’t know it."
 
Political discussions were recounted with Robert Kennedy as to policy towards Cuba, and President Kennedy. The latter said to have taken place at had luncheon with the Peter Lawfords. She was very pleased, as she had asked the President a lot of socially significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing. Monroe supported Peace Action, which was created from a merge of Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.
 
While in Mexico in 1962, she openly associated with Americans who were identified by the FBI as communists, such as Frederick Vanderbilt Field. The daughter of Monroe's last psychiatrist, Joan Greenson, said that Monroe was “passionate about equal rights, rights for blacks, rights for the poor. She identified strongly with the workers."
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 29, 2011, 09:10:45 am



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_P2FFIVV8A&feature=relmfu[/youtube]



(....)


Monroe met Miller in 1950. During this filming of Bus Stop,  the relationship between Monroe and Miller had developed, and although the couple were able to maintain their privacy for almost a year, the press began to write about them as a couple, often referred to as "The Egghead and The Hourglass". In reflecting on his courtship of Monroe, Miller wrote, "She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence."
 
The reports of their romance were soon overtaken by news that Miller had been called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee to explain his supposed communist affiliations. Called upon to identify communists he was acquainted with, Miller refused and was charged with contempt of Congress. He was acquitted on appeal. During the investigation, Monroe was urged by film executives to abandon Miller, rather than risk her career but she refused, later branding them as "born cowards".
 
The press began to discuss an impending marriage, but Monroe and Miller refused to confirm the rumor. In June 1956, a reporter was following them by car, and as they attempted to elude him, the reporter's car crashed, killing a female passenger. Monroe became hysterical upon hearing the news, and their engagement was announced, partly in the expectation that it would reduce the excessive media interest they were being subjected to.


(....)


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 29, 2011, 09:40:26 am



See the Upper Left (Highbrow Despicable) Quadrant in this week's New York Magazine 's Approval Matrix
("Our deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies."):

Published Nov 27, 2011


http://nymag.com/arts/all/approvalmatrix/approval-matrix-2011-12-5/

(http://images.nymag.com/arts/all/approvalmatrix/matrix111203_900.jpg)

Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Jeff Wrangler on November 29, 2011, 09:41:50 am
Uh-oh.

I first saw "The Prince and the Showgirl" many, many years ago--and adored it! Everytime I would see it (and THAT'S a long, long time ago I had a television in the house!) I would see it again.

Oops! Not saying anything about MY sense or taste, I guess!!

Ha!

 ::) ::)

But who did you want to be, John? The Prince ... or the Showgirl?  ;D  :-*
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on November 29, 2011, 10:01:06 am
But who did you want to be, John? The Prince ... or the Showgirl?  ;D  :-*


Ha! Well, I really loved the whole thing--I thought Olivier was making fun of his own pomposity, and I thought Marilyn was delightful, but--

If you really  want to know the truth--   ::) ::) ::)  :laugh:

I was gaga  over the boy-King, Nicky! IDMB tells us that "Jeremy Spencer" was born Jeremy John Dornhurst de Sarem (what a moniker!), he was 19 years old during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl,  five years later he was "Young Man" in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone  (1961) with Vivien Leigh (!!!) and, sadly, his last project was filmed ten years later in Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

Intriguing!



http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0818215/bio

Biography for
Jeremy Spenser


Trivia
In 1969 Jeremy Spenser married his ex wife Daniela Grillolova Ornisteinova who is now a very distinguished philantropist and authoress who now resides in Mexico.

Brother of Actor "David Spencer". Jeremy played the part of "Young Prince Nikolaus von Karpathien" in the Movie "The Prince and the Showgirl" 1957 with Marilyn Monroe.
 

Where Are They Now
Last known as being a drama teacher (1969). Despite his mysterious disappearance c. 1966, Jeremy Spenser is confirmed to be still alive and well.


 :o ???



By the way--I wasn't alone
in my admiration of King Nicky,
was I?

 :laugh:
(http://www.all-movies.eu/pictures/o/1298658361/12986583733858a2510eb0dff20ee3581edacf0663.jpg)
Was that YOU, Jeff??
 :D ;) ;D
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Jeff Wrangler on November 29, 2011, 11:52:05 am
I've never seen the movie. Is that him to Olivier's left?

Actually, Don Murray in Bus Stop is more to my taste.
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on January 18, 2012, 08:34:26 am



She hasn't seen it since. But she does know what she thinks of it now. "I think it's a great film. And...it's probably obvious but..." She pauses for a long time, and when she picks up the thought her voice is quieter and higher: "...well, he's really quite astounding in it. Heath."




http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201202/michelle-williams-gq-february-2012-cover-story-article?currentPage=1


Some Like Her Hot
It seemed crazy at first. Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe?
Come on. We knew Williams could act—but could she make us
drool? America, we have our answer. Meet the winner of GQ's
(okay, yes, unofficial) award for best actress

 
by Chris Heath
Photographs by Michael Thompson
February 2012


(http://www.gq.com/images/women/2012/02/michelle-williams/michelle-williams-03.jpg)



Here is what happens in this article: I meet with Michelle Williams on three days in two different cities over a bit more than a week. Much does not go as either of us expects. On the first day, we mainly talk about her youth, and I make her cry. On the second, we mainly talk about her becoming Marilyn Monroe. This is the only dry-eyed meeting. (Unless—quite possible—I was too insensitive to notice.) On the third, we mainly talk about her life with, and without, Heath Ledger. At the end of the third day, we walk around a park in the dark. At the end of the second day, we tidy up the leftovers of her daughter's birthday cupcakes. At the end of the first day, she leaves in tears, her parting words: "That was really awful."

That's about all. There's also a moment at the very end of the article that could be taken as an atmospheric, ambivalent allegory about the chasing of dreams, but is probably just a brief account of a long hike. The rest is taken up with all that kind of stuff that people sometimes say when they're asked enough questions. If any of it breaks your heart, it was probably already a little broken to begin with.
 


···


On that first day, we meet at the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles. This extensive residential compound is a legendary staging post for aspiring actors—indeed for anyone trying to get a foothold in the city. It is also where Michelle Williams used to stay in her early teens, long before Dawson's Creek,  let alone her subsequent stealthy rise through an interesting mess of movies, whose inevitable misfires never seemed to be hers, until she emerged as one of the great unshowy talents of her generation. Meeting here was my suggestion. No great reason. In everything I'd read about her, this was the only place in Los Angeles that seemed even slightly significant. (She's lived in Brooklyn for many years.) Though she phones me when she's on her way, wondering if we should change the plan because it's raining and she is wearing thin ballet-style shoes, I'm already there and can't think of an easy alternative. When she arrives—it's just after nine in the morning—she leaves her car (she has a driver), climbs into mine, and I slowly drive round the apartment's parking lot while we work out what to do.

"This is crazy," she says. "Why did I agree to this?"

She tells me that she hasn't been back here for fifteen years. When she first decided that she wanted to be an actress, at the age of 11 or 12, her parents would drive her up from their San Diego home to Los Angeles for auditions and, eventually, for jobs. By 15 she would become legally emancipated and have her own apartment in the Valley, but before that she'd stay here off and on, usually with her mother. "Such a strange place to revisit," she says.
 
I park and we take shelter from the rain in a covered outdoor stairway. Williams can't even quite recall which apartment was once hers, but some memories begin to trickle back. First, the decor. "I ­remember there was a lot of teal and pink," she says. Then the inhabitants. "I wonder if the people I remember still live here." She pulls a name from her memory. "Devin Oatway. I kind of want to go to the front desk and ask if his parents are still here." She won't, of course. "Oh, I had such a crush on him," she says. "He gave me Thus Spake Zarathustra. "
 
So, even then, she was the kind of girl whose pulse privately quickened for Nietzsche? It's sensible to be wary of such details, and wonder whether they're just a typical affectation of a young actor straining for seriousness, but for Williams it all seems to come from somewhere inside her that was established early and deeply. "My dad gave me Notes from the Underground  when I was 12," she explains, and here and now, sitting on a step of the building where she used to read such books, she quietly recites to me the opening of Dostoevsky's nihilistic landmark: "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man...."

Clearly, I observe, she was quite drawn toward the dark.
 
"I was, yeah. Aren't most teenagers?"
 
No, I say. Lots, but not most. Otherwise there'd be no sports.
 
She considers this, agrees that it might be true. "Maybe when I was in my early twenties and my late teens, I was more prone to sitting in it or lacerating myself with it," she says. "Now I want to move out of it. I have a daughter. I want a happy life."
 


···


She is discussing her education, and how she ended up being home-schooled and doing correspondence courses—a better fit with her acting work, and a way to sidestep the unwanted bother she'd begun to face at school. "There's plenty of opportunities to tease someone who's been in a Lassie  movie." Her last formal school was Santa Fe Christian in San Diego; later its principal would denounce Williams after she appeared in Brokeback Mountain.  ("Michelle doesn't represent the values of this institution," he said. "She made the kinds of choices of which we wouldn't approve.") "It didn't really bother me," she says, when I allude to this.
 
No twinge, I ask, when you suddenly found out that you'd been living a sinful, artistic career?
 
"It wasn't any surprise to me," she says. "I knew. I remember my mother saying to me at one point, 'Just don't make anything your grandmother couldn't see.' And at that point I knew I was living a sinful artistic career, because I had done, and I knew I would do."
 
So I ask her what the first thing was that really stepped over that line, and that's when she starts telling me about this New York play. It was called Killer Joe.  In it, there was copious violence and rough, raw emotion, within which, each night, she was required to take off all her clothes. She was 18 and on break from Dawson's Creek.  That summer she'd had two offers—to make a lot of money in a film about cheerleaders with guns, or to make next to nothing and face the discomforts of Killer Joe.  For a girl determined to prove which path she was on, it was an easy decision. "That play, I see it as a direct link from there to where I am now."

And that's when I ask the first question that seems to derail her. When I say it, I have no idea that it'll be a big deal. It's not even really a question—I just mention something she said in one of her early interviews: that after her parents came to see the play, she had to go and find a therapist.
 
But when I say this, she looks at me in the way you look when you're sort of shocked and hurt and feel invaded; when you're determined to show none of this but know it will be a losing battle.

"Oh God," she says. "Wow. I mean, I must have said that twelve years ago, before I learned to shut my mouth. Wow." Then, less to me than to herself: "All right, I can take it. I'm 31—I can take it."
 
Hesitantly, she agrees to fill in a few details. "They weren't fans of that play. It was like [an] alien invasion or something in our normal lives where there weren't artists—they hadn't seen anything like it." To make it worse, her parents didn't even tell her they were coming—she didn't know they were there until they surprised her afterward, backstage. "I think I was having a beer. I haven't asked them about that for a long time. We don't bring that one up."



···


When Williams legally emancipated herself from her parents at 15, she didn't do so because of any family schism, but for the independence and the practical advantages—she says she no longer needed a tutor and could work adult hours. When I suggest that it was pretty ambitious and self-contained to think she could handle it, she agrees. "It was just stupid. I didn't know what I was taking on," she says. "I don't think things through very often—I don't project into the future about how a situation will turn out. Even the simplest things, I'm guilty of making really bad decisions a lot of the time. In my work it's a capacity that's served me well, but in my life it can be a problem."

She describes being "a 15-year-old making a house as best as she could. I had an egg crate for a mattress. It's hard to tuck your sheets under an egg crate." It was, she says, "very, very lonely." She also refers to "just being around not-great people"; there were clearly experiences difficult enough that she would prefer to keep the details to herself.

Do you feel angry about anything that happened then?
 
"Not as much anymore. There's a lot of distance now. Fifteen years of distance. Since I left this time period, living in Los Angeles, I haven't felt like anybody's prey."
 
Do you think whatever happened was your fault or other people's fault?
 
"My opinion of that has changed over the years. I don't know—do kids have culpability?"

When she talks about her life, Williams can make it sound as though, beneath a fragile veneer of confidence, she has spent a long time flailing to catch on to the kind of everyday knowledge that she felt everyone else just seemed to know. When I refer to something she once said about how, living in Wilmington, North Carolina, for Dawson's Creek,  she would sometimes just order two pizzas at once—one for dinner and one for breakfast—she nods. "I didn't know how to keep myself warm in the winter or cool in the summer. It felt like somebody was withholding all the secrets—how to take care of yourself and where to get the things that would help you take care of yourself. I just literally didn't know where to go. I was too shy to ask for help or to admit that I was cold or that I was uncomfortable or that I didn't know what I was doing. Look, I didn't know what I was doing at so many points in my life that I felt that if I had stopped and admitted that I didn't know what I was doing then I would be really lost, and the best thing to do was to just keep forging and to act like you were okay." When she was in New York for Killer Joe  she would carry a map with her, but when anyone else was around she kept it hidden away. She would rather walk block after block in the wrong direction than be seen consulting the map.
 
"I didn't want anybody to know," she says, "that I didn't know where I was going."
 


···


After an hour or so in the stairwell, we get back into my car. Williams remembers that when she lived here she used to have her own car, a '65 Mustang that she would drive, as she puts it, "not totally legally." She was never caught. "I would take a lot of drives through the hills. I liked grocery shopping at night."

As we pull away from her old home, she says that she never could have come here a few years ago. When she told a friend about this plan last night, her friend told her she was crazy. "She has heard the stories," says Williams. "The ones I didn't tell." Williams is still wondering why she said yes. "I guess I must have been curious about it, too. I guess I really do just feel lucky that I got out. Everybody that was there, we were all trying to do the same thing."
 
Williams and I next go to the kind of place where the lucky few who check out in triumph from the Oakwood apartments end up, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and sit in the dining room for a quick final few minutes while she eats some tortilla soup to fortify herself before she appears on Ellen.  Figuring that there's no time to get into some of the more difficult and involved subjects I hope we'll discuss, I inquire about her early days growing up in Montana. Her father has clearly lived a colorful life—at various times an investment guru, an explorer (he claimed to have found the true site of Mount Sinai), and a failed Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Montana. He and Williams's mother divorced when Michelle was 24. With her mother she remains close. With her father, less so. "We're not in contact at the moment," she'll tell me, "but maybe that will change." When she was young, it was different. "He taught me how to fish. He taught me how to shoot clay pigeons. He bought me the lightest running shoes. He is certainly where I inherited my independent streak from. He put books in my hands."

Somehow, in the last few minutes, as she prepares to leave, all the awkwardnesses she has been feeling seem to coalesce. It seems partly to be a discomfort in talking about her parents, and partly that she feels ambushed by being reminded of things she said years ago and which otherwise seem to have been forgotten about, and partly the lingering effects of our earlier expedition to a reminder of a difficult adolescence. Whatever the exact cause, I first notice that she is chewing the tulip-motif scarf round her neck, and then I realize that she is crying. "Boy, I get to do Ellen  now..." she mutters. "I can't wait...I'm in a fantastic mood...oh, what did I get myself into?..." She talks through her tears: "I wasn't expecting this. I thought I'd gotten so good at this recently. I'm like, 'Ah, I can do this.' Goddammit, I thought I'd gotten better at it. I'm not leaving because I'm crying...there are people waiting. But it feels like a terrible ending." That's when she says, "That was really awful," and she is sort of laughing, too, though less the way you laugh at something you find funny and more the way you laugh at something whose awkwardness is so huge as to seem absurd. It would be a bad way for any interview to end. This one perhaps more so, because I'm pretty sure we're both thinking about how much remains that hasn't yet even been mentioned.
 


···


On Ellen  she talks about her daughter Matilda's new dog, Lucky, and bashfully accepts compliments about what a wonderful actress she is. We meet again the following week in a suburb of Detroit. Williams has been based here for months, filming Disney's Wizard of Oz  prequel, Oz the Great and Powerful,  directed by Sam Raimi (a movie that will not be released until 2013). She says she took the part "to make a movie for Matilda, to make something she could see." She plays Glinda the Good Witch and for now Matilda truly believes that her mother can fly. Matilda turned 6 yesterday, and Williams arrives bearing leftover cupcakes from the party. (I bite into the whole cupcake; she cuts hers into quarters first. "That's what you do when you have a kid. That's a mommy move.") We sit in the corner of an empty hotel dining area, just us and the Muzak. (About half an hour after it's played, we discover that the song we've both noticed was a version of Patrick Swayze's "She's Like the Wind," which may betray something odd about both of us. "I wasn't going to say anything," she says.)
 
Cupcakes...Patrick Swayze...flying witches...it feels like, without acknowledging it, we're both trying to make sure that this conversation doesn't pick up where the last one ended. It seems a wise time to talk about My Week with Marilyn.

What is so impressive about Williams's performance as Marilyn Monroe is everything that it is not. Every legendary aspect of Monroe's that you'd expect is in there somewhere—the vulnerability, the flirtatiousness, the slapstick, the desperation, the oozing sexuality, the wounded fragility, the chronic insecurity—but rather than being overtly played, these are hidden away where they should be, inside a character who Williams manages the near impossible feat of convincing us might once have been an actual human being. The best advice she got before filming began, advice clearly taken, came after she had approached Philip Seymour Hoffmann (whom she had appeared with in Synecdoche, New York ) and told him, "I've committed to this awful thing of playing Marilyn Monroe." "His advice," she says, "was: 'If there's even a whiff of the icon, things get much less interesting.'"

Still, anyone who has followed Michelle Williams's career could have sensibly raised a quizzical eyebrow at the news that she had taken this role in the first place. In her first TV appearance, on Baywatch,  Williams was a bikini-clad teen jogging along the beach, an object of desire for the son of David Hasselhoff's character. It suggested a path that her subsequent career didn't follow. Inasmuch as the role that first made her famous—the Dawson's Creek  bad girl Jen—still somewhat played into regular sexy-girl stereotypes, that only made her swerve in the opposite direction with all the more resolve.
 
"I wouldn't say that that would be one of my first qualities as a human being—being sexy," Williams reasons. "And I think because my character on Dawson's Creek  was sexy...sexualized...sexual...I saw all the negative attention and connotations that can come along with that. And that those things can keep people from seeing you clearly."

It's notable that in the movie roles Williams took in the Dawson's Creek  era, she monopolized the dumpy-sister and dumpy-friend roles. "I really wanted to do that," she says. "When you play sexy you're kind of playing just for men. That is something you have to police and turn it on its head." A path, it seemed, was set. "I mean, sexuality has been a part of my work, obviously...Blue Valentine ...but it's never been sexy, it hasn't been beautiful."

Recently she realized that her evasive maneuvers might have been too successful. "It's funny spending your twenties running away from it, and then you hit your thirties...wait a second! Come back! I want that time back when I didn't appreciate what I had! That kind of ripe sexuality, when you hit your thirties you feel more in possession of it, you feel it's not something that can be sort of taken away from you and reassembled."
 
That is one reason why she threw herself into the challenge of playing Marilyn Monroe. It was only after she read the script for My Week with Marilyn  that she remembered the poster. In her teenage bedroom in San Diego she had an Edward Hopper print, and a collage of people's eyes cut out from magazines, and a board on which she'd pin up pages ripped from books and treasured quotations like Walt Whitman's "I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines." Her friends may have had pictures of the latest teen heartthrobs: "For me it was Montgomery Clift. Him and James Dean." But one day when she was about 12, shopping with her mother at the mall, Williams saw a photo in the poster shop. It wasn't the beginning of some kind of fixation: "In the years that passed, I didn't develop into a rabid Marilyn Monroe fan, I didn't see all her movies, I didn't read about her." But she had to have that picture.


"Something about it reminded me of Montana," she says, "spinning in the grass barefoot. Maybe because it made her feel so relatable. And made Marilyn seem like she was just a girl or something. She's spinning, and she's wearing a white dress and barefoot and her arms are out and she is spinning with her head back and she's smiling. And she looks so happy." Williams hung it next to her bed where she could see it as she lay there. "Maybe this felt like the real her or something," wonders Williams. "Because those ones where she is backed into a corner with a dress falling off, those ones feel like they're for men."

This has been a much calmer conversation. Today is Halloween, and she must leave to prepare Matilda and herself. Michelle is to be an owl—just some feathers stuck onto some round glasses and a construction-paper beak. Matilda will be Shirley Temple. "She really likes all that stuff. She likes Fred and Ginger, and Larry, Curly, and Moe." Michelle explains that when she sees her daughter interacting comfortably with other children and adults, she feels everything is okay. That she's done something right. "When she skips," says Michelle, "she leaves the earth."
 


···


In her earliest memory, Michelle Williams is on a preschool field trip to the local park in Montana. She is wearing a brand-new yellow dress made by her grandmother, with a purple unicorn on its pocket. One moment she is feeding the ducks in the pond, the next she has gotten too close and has fallen in. She's not in danger—she is standing there in the shallow water—and so she just stays where she is, shocked at this unexpected turn of events. Shocked that at one moment you could be feeding ducks, the next you could be wet. Shocked that something so benign could change so quickly. And she is also thinking something like: I wonder if I just stand here nobody will notice. Maybe I could be a duck.
 
She has another memory, just a little later. She is at her great-grandparents' house, also the location of her earliest memory of delirious happiness (riding bareback, galloping through a field). But today there is a big storm, and she is outside playing in a puffy jacket, and when she tries to get back to the house the wind blows her around and she runs into the barbed-wire fence. And she realizes she is stuck. The harder she tries to escape, the more the barbs go into her jacket.
 
She told me these two stories—I'd asked her to think back as early as she could recall—in Los Angeles while waiting for her tortilla soup. And then she wondered aloud: "So why does my mind choose those two memories that can be used as metaphors for the rest of my life? Was I always who I am now?"
 


···


When Williams sits down for our third and final meeting, I ask her about Brokeback Mountain.  I do want to know about her memories of making the film, but we both also know where this is going. She tells me about being Ang Lee's first auditionee for the role, at eight o'clock in the morning, and how she tried to sell him on the notion that landscapes are inherent in your character and so her Montana upbringing made her the right choice. Maybe that's even what swayed him. Either way, he chose wisely. There are plenty of fine Michelle Williams performances from before then—her 2003 cameo in The Station Agent,  for instance—but this was something more. The stillness and broken love of her despair seemed to anchor the grander melodrama that surrounded. I ask whether it was a difficult role to play. She pauses for a moment, then answers, "Not compared to what everybody else had to do." When she and Heath Ledger saw the finished film together, they complimented each other, but beyond that they weren't sure. "I didn't know what to make of it," she says. "Maybe when you see something different for the first time, you don't know how to categorize it. It doesn't really fit with anything else. Like the first time you listen to Björk. The first time you eat sashimi."
 
She hasn't seen it since. But she does know what she thinks of it now. "I think it's a great film. And...it's probably obvious but..." She pauses for a long time, and when she picks up the thought her voice is quieter and higher: "...well, he's really quite astounding in it. Heath."
 
I ask her why she thinks they were so drawn to each other. (A long pause follows. All the pauses will be long from now on.)
 
"There's an answer that I know," she says, "but I don't want to say." She talks around this not-saying for a while, then says, "Our initial meeting, the circumstances of how we first met, were cosmic or something." They were together through the shoot, and soon she was pregnant. "Yeah, a lot of things happened at once," she says. "It's a bit like: We had a lot of things to do, because we didn't have a lot of time, or something."
 
The waiter brings her a chamomile tea—we are at the same hotel table as yesterday—and lights a candle. Michelle breaks off her flow and watches. "It feels like lighting a candle for somebody," she says. "I feel like..." She trails off. "Where was I?"
 
I begin to ask her how she heard what had happened to Ledger—she was in Sweden at the time, making a sad film called Mammoth —but she quickly, firmly shakes her head. After it happened, she had to do a final week's shooting in New York. "It was horrible." Following that, she was also committed to appearing in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.  "I don't remember most of it," she says. "I've got a lot of holes." Once the film was completed, she wondered whether she would ever want to work again. Or whether she would just stop.
 
"That seemed like a really smart idea," she says. "You just want to be able to walk out of your house and turn your face to the sun and stumble down a corner where you have some memory, and you're not really allowed any of that." The paparazzi compounded her torments in a way that was unbearable. She acknowledges that death is something that may intrude at any time into anyone's life. "But the other stuff, there's no handbook on that," she says. "It was making me crazy. I felt like I was going crazy. It was too much—trying to deal with what had happened and trying to deal with what was at our doorstep. I just felt trapped. And it's not just me—there's somebody else who I'm trying to protect, and I can't. I can't make it stop, I can't make it go away. Trying to find ways to explain it or shield her from it. It's like you're trying to go about your life, and make dinner...but the roof is off of your house, and the walls are falling down."
 
The things that would eventually help, just a little, would be very small things. "Moments that were strung like beads on a thread...and they were very far apart from each other. I mean, it sounds so silly, but a just-right cup of tea. I spent a lot of time taking baths. A lot of tea and baths—double warm."
 
And still no work. Before, she had always relied on work and loved the way that it would help her get through difficult times, but she knew it wouldn't help here. "That didn't apply anymore. There was no working through this. This is something that had to be gotten through on its own terms. On its own terms." In fact, the moment when she missed acting never came. Instead, her hand was deftly forced. She had read the script for Blue Valentine  many years before, when she was 21, and committed to make it once the director, Derek Cianfrance, had the money. Now he came to her. The money was in place. They were ready to begin.
 
At first she stuck firm. Told him no. The film was set, and was to be shot, in California. She wouldn't travel. Not now. She wouldn't further disrupt Matilda's life for a film.
 
Cianfrance returned with a new proposition. They would reset the film on the East Coast, and he promised that she would never be more than an hour away from either her Brooklyn or upstate New York homes. She was both grateful and infuriated. How could she say no? Her yearlong sabbatical was over. "I went back internally kicking and screaming," she says. "I am now very grateful."
 
Blue Valentine 's back-and-forth montage of a relationship in golden blossoming and toxic unwinding is a great modern portrait of how love in all its purity and might is sometimes simply not up to the job required of it. When Williams gave interviews about the film, she would talk about how she drew upon the difficult unacknowledged atmosphere in her family's home growing up. I'm sure this was important, but it seemed impossible to me that this memory was all she was thinking about. It felt as though there was something obvious that everyone was considerately tiptoeing around. A young couple, a very young daughter, a deep love, a parting of ways; she and Ledger had been apart for some time when he died. But today, when I nudge toward this, and how she must have drawn on other circumstances close to her, she quickly says, "Only the magic of falling in love" and firmly diverts the conversation to her parents. Maybe it's that she won't talk about it, but maybe it is that she couldn't even allow herself to consider the slightest parallels at the time she was filming, and so what she is saying is absolutely true.



···


Her Detroit home is a few minutes from here by foot, and I walk her back through the cold, misty night. When we reach the large park near the house she's renting, we slowly circle its pathways and keep talking. About reading, about writing. It turns out that Williams is also the kind of person who signs up for an e-mail service offered by the Oxford English Dictionary where they send you a new, interesting word and its definition each day. When she particularly likes them, she writes them down in her little notebook. (Today's word: arpeggio. ) For books, she is currently, she says, "going to the James Franco school." (Her Oz  co-star's most successful tip: the stories of Grace Paley. "He said, 'She is going to be your favorite—I can tell,' and she is, she absolutely is.") We also talk about a book that was important to her in the aftermath of Ledger's death, Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  Williams once quoted a line on Nightline  that helped her: " 'When you have truly lost everything then at least you can become rich in loss.' " The strange thing is that Williams misquoted, and for this purpose improved, Solnit's actual words: "And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

"I didn't know I had done that," she says, and explains why the thought was so useful to her. "The 'rich in loss' made me laugh. I would just think, 'Filthy stinking rich! Filthy stinking rich!' in a perverse-gallows-humor kind of way. It made me laugh, it made me feel drunk, it made me feel high with loss, in that tightrope kind of way of sadness and hysteria. And when you don't have ideas like that, it feels too messy to bear. It gave me great comfort. It was something I would repeat to myself, like a mantra. Because for some time it felt like we had lost everything. And those words, that idea, calmed me down."
 
We continue in circles—occasionally she points out where the swings are, somewhere in the dark foggy distance—and then walk the last few yards to her house. Out front is her sister Paige with the new dog, Lucky; somewhere safe inside, Matilda. That's where I leave her.
 
When I asked which recent daily word she had liked the best, the one she chose seemed to say plenty about what she now cherishes.
 
"Fastness," she said. " 'A protected place in between two rocks.' "
 


···


Before, when we are still at the hotel table, chamomile tea and flickering candle in front of her, she tells me this: "Nothing has turned out like I expected to. Some things have been better, and some things have been much, much, much worse."
 
I ask her whether everything she's been through has changed how she thinks about love.
 
"Like I said, there's not an area of my...there's not a cell, not a molecule. No corner is untouched. You know, it's like a reorganization of everything. Everything is different."
 
She explains that a year or two ago, she was putting herself under a lot of pressure to find someone new to spend her life with, for a particular reason. "Because I really wanted, and I really expected or imagined, that Matilda would have siblings that were close to her age. I wanted that for her. But I couldn't make that happen. And now that she's 6 that isn't even a possibility anymore. So something that was making me feel impatient, that's been removed. For whatever reason, that's not our luck, or our path."

A further thought. "You know, as hard as certain things have been for me, it's been harder thinking about how things will be for her. I have a lot of things that she doesn't, and some of what I have I can give to her—the memories that I have, the objects that I have, the physical reminders that I have, the stories. But she won't really have any that are solely..." And that is where that sentence ends.

There is a question I have been wanting to understand the answer to, but have been feeling that I simply can't ask. Eventually I just ask it anyway:
 
Do you think there was a part of you that imagined the two of you would somehow end up together?
 
Immediately, I wish that I hadn't. The look on her face—a kind of juddering visceral alarm at what has been said...I don't wish to see that look many more times in my life. "That would make me way too sad to answer," she says quickly, and I hurriedly begin another question, about something completely different, hoping that if I say it fast enough these new words will chase the old words away from where they are hanging in the air between us, and maybe she will let me pretend that it was something I never said.
 
"No, no," she says, and I can see the tears forming, and I think she means that she doesn't want to answer any more questions about anything. I mutter some kind of apology under my breath.

But, even now, I'm wrong about everything. Mostly she is just trying to stop my new question. She has something to tell me.
 
"No," she says. "I said it would make me too sad to answer but it's also..."—and she nods even as her voice breaks once more with tears—"...one of my favorite things to imagine." And through the tears, a beaming, almost beatific smile stretches room-wide across her face. "It's actually one of my favorite places to visit."
 


···


That morning at the Oakwood apartments, Michelle Williams looked up at the desolate scrubby hill rising to our right, and it reminded her of the time when she and two young male actors broke through the fence that was supposed to keep the coyotes out and the young actors in, and headed upward. She remembered that their hike was a lot farther than anticipated, and she remembered that they didn't take enough water, and she remembered that at times she was a little scared, but that eventually they reached their destination. The HOLLYWOOD sign. She remembered the ladders behind the letters. She remembered how there was underwear on each step. And she remembered how she climbed up anyway to the middle of the first "O" in "Hollywood," and sat there for a while.


Also posted in Chez Tremblay's "Michelle Michelle Michelle" thread:
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,6778.msg626210/topicseen.html#msg626210
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Aloysius J. Gleek on January 18, 2012, 08:41:12 am



http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201202/michelle-williams-gq-february-2012-cover-story-photos#slide=1



(http://www.gq.com/images/women/2012/02/michelle-williams/michelle-williams-cover.jpg)
Cardigan, $525, by Alexander Wang. Bra, $130, and panties,
$60, by Stella McCartney.




(http://www.gq.com/images/women/2012/02/michelle-williams/michelle-williams-01.jpg)
Shirt by Stella McCartney. Bra by Eres. Ring by Me & Ro



(http://www.gq.com/images/women/2012/02/michelle-williams/michelle-williams-02.jpg)
Slip dress by La Perla. Bra and panties by Myla.



(http://www.gq.com/images/women/2012/02/michelle-williams/michelle-williams-03.jpg)
Sweater by Stella McCartney. Bra and panties by Agent Provocateur.



(http://www.gq.com/images/women/2012/02/michelle-williams/michelle-williams-outtake.jpg)



Also posted in Chez Tremblay's "Michelle Michelle Michelle" thread:
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,6778.msg626211/topicseen.html#msg626211
Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: RouxB on January 22, 2012, 03:55:13 pm
Marilyn came along at a good time for Michelle. She now seems to have the maturity to expand her experience beyond how she had always seen herself. In the interview she alluded to the fact that she was falling into a movie type that she was afaid she would be stuck with forever. Now we have a different perspective of her (nice chonies) which should, hopefully, broaden her appeal and her role choices.

Title: Re: Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”
Post by: Mandy21 on April 28, 2012, 10:56:18 am
I finally got around to watching this last night on DVD.  I thought it was a good-enough film, and that Michelle did a fine job of trying to capture a rather uncaptureable and elusive personality from the glory days of Hollywood.    I suppose it's the kind of film that you just have to accept for what it is -- in this case, 95 minutes of mostly fluff -- rather than hoping it will delve deeper in many of the scenes.  I found myself wishing Michelle had more lines to work with, more emotions to face, more tears to shed, etc.

Does anyone know what her feelings were about doing the GQ promotional layout?  Those kinds of blatant, forced sexuality don't seem to mesh in any way with the Michelle we think we know from reading her words in interviews over the years, do they?  The expression on her face seems not sexy or mysterious or Marilyn-like, but rather unenthusiastic and unwilling as Michelle the person.  Does anyone else get that impression?

As always, with all of the Michelle movies I see, at the end there are the inevitable and forever questions lingering in my mind:  What would Heath have thought of her performance?  Would he have picked up the phone to give his thoughts to her?  Would he have been sitting next to her at the premiere?  Would he have been lying next to her in bed watching it again on cable some night, perhaps with Matilda snuggled between them?  Would their careers have soared in tandem?  And all I'm left with is silence.