Heat Wave: Michelle Williams is hot stuff as Marilyn
By Baz Bamigboye
How marvellously appropriate that Simon Curtis’s movie My Week With Marilyn has a pre-opening credit sequence with Michelle Williams portraying Marilyn Monroe singing Heat Wave.
But it’s all Michelle Williams: the voice, the hair, the pout, the sashay are all part of her sensational interpretation.
When I saw the actress on set last November she told me she wanted to bring to the screen ‘a kind of sensitivity that those who loved her [Monroe] would spend the rest of their lives trying to describe’ - and that’s just what she’s done.
The film’s title alludes to the friendship that developed between Monroe and Colin Clark, an Eton-educated toff hired as an assistant to Laurence Olivier during the making of The Prince And The Showgirl at Pinewood Studios - where My Week was also shot - in the late Fifties.
For a short while, Monroe was able to be herself around Clark, and the pair went off on a jolly jaunt, skinny-dipping and visiting Windsor Castle.
It was a brief respite from the private pain Monroe tried to mask.
All that and more comes through in Williams’s portrait.
She not only gives us Monroe, the world-renowned star, but also switches between two other roles: Elsie Marina (the character she plays in The Prince And The Showgirl) and the lost girl who is Norma Jean.
It’s electrifying watching these two titans (Williams and Branagh are bound to get Oscar nominations) who speak the same language but are unable to communicate.
The movie has its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 9 and opens here on November 25.
