First published 1995 Harper Collins ( )

THE PRINCE, THE SHOWGIRL, AND ME: SIX MONTHS ON THE SET WITH MARILYN AND OLIVIER, by Colin Clark.

When possibly the greatest actor in the world joined forces with the biggest movie star in the world for a romantic comedy, one could justifiably hope for a Great Event in cinema history. One could just as justifiably wonder how these astonishingly different people could possibly work together.

Colin Clark (son of the great art historian Sir Kenneth Clark) worked as a third assistant director on the film, which was called THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL. Sir Laurence Olivier repeated his stage role as the pompous prince regent of a Balkan nation. Marilyn Monroe played the slightly ditzy yet actually quite bright (and adorable) American actress who catches the prince's fancy then shows him a thing or two about being human. Olivier directed the film, and he and Monroe, through their respective production companies, produced it. Though the film itself is rather lovely, the making of it is a bit of a horror legend in the film world. Clark's daily diary entries take the reader through a close-up view of the normally difficult world of movie making, with special emphasis on the abnormally difficult making of this particular film.

Olivier was the most professional of actors: letter-perfect on his lines (and everyone else's), punctual, assured, and deeply prepared. Monroe was a limping fawn with little self-esteem, virtually no professionalism, and an unfailing ability to live without awareness of any needs but her own. That her life before fame had been a battered one, and that her need for affirmation and adoration revealed itself by ignoring anything that *wasn't* affirmation and adoration, are well-known. In Clark's view, she was not an awful person who deliberately dismissed the concerns of others. Rather she was incapable of seeing any needs but her own, which meant that the world revolved around her needs and she was blind to all else. Blind, as in cannot be blamed for not seeing. In normal circumstances, one can accommodate the needs of someone so wounded, so helpless. But when millions of dollars are at stake, when people's entire careers are on the line, and when one's entire being is centered on an ideal of professionalism, it's easy to see how pity would quickly subside, to be replaced by anger and contempt.

Monroe was never on time. She found it difficult to remember any lines that required her to change her course of thinking in a scene. She was sometimes dazed or bewildered, sometimes tipsy, sometimes drugged. She was freshly married to famed playwright Arthur Miller, who apparently treated her abominably. She was pregnant and apparently suffered a miscarriage during filming. She was unable to accept direction from anyone except her acting coach (actually, the *wife* of her acting coach). She often left early or missed entire shooting days without notice. Olivier lost patience quickly, struggled mightily to maintain the production, had difficulty with his own performance, and was so traumatized by the experience that he didn't direct another film for 13 years.

But it is Monroe who, in my reading, comes off the most sympathetic. It's not that Olivier should have done anything different--perhaps he would better have coddled her than confronted her as often as he did, perhaps not--but rather that the situation was simply impossible. When Colin Clark mentioned a few years later to director Billy Wilder that he, too, had worked with Monroe, Wilder exclaimed, "Ah. Then you too know the meaning of pure pain." Monroe was most certainly incapable of being anything or anyone but who she was, and to get what was indeed her special magic on screen, it was necessary to live with who and what she was, to go through the crucible of fire that working with her entailed. Olivier, on the other hand, (despite being one of my two favorite actors and a figure I esteem higher than anyone in the profession), comes off as unfeeling and short of understanding and flexibility. There is probably nothing he could have done to make the situation better, but his rigidity on and off camera might have made it worse.

Colin Clark himself seems like a likeable fellow with a fine eye for detail and a rare insight into human nature. Though but a callow youth at the time of his experience, he shows an admirable realism about the people he cares about (particularly Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh) while making it clear that Monroe's often abominable behavior was not entirely condemnable, in light of who she was. Clark is a wonderful guide behind the scenes in the making of a film that, considering how awful the making of it was for all concerned, came off as a not unenjoyable piece of cinema.

On the day Monroe finished the film, she presented presents to the entire crew. Upon her departure, to a one, the crew tossed the gifts unopened into the waste bin. Clark's book makes it very understandable how such a gesture of disdain could be possible. It also makes it very clear that the gesture was not entirely justified.

By the way, I read this book and saw the movie more or less simultaneously. If you ever get a chance to do it that way, I highly recommend it. It made every moment richer, both in reading and in watching. ( )

In 1956, 23-year-old Colin Clark (right) got a job working on The Prince and the Showgirl, the film that disastrously united Laurence Olivier with Marilyn Monroe.His job turned into his memoir My Week With Marilyn. He wrote about that fateful period with a delicious, gossipy wit (Clark was the younger brother of another renowned diarist, the late Alan Clark MP – bon vivant and flamboyant womaniser). He offered a vivid account of the problems each day on the set seemed to bring, and is at his best on the prickly relationship between Monroe and Olivier (to whom he refers in shorthand as MM and SLO). 'MM doesn't really forget her lines,' he wrote. 'It is more as if she had never quite learnt them – as if they are pinned to her mental noticeboard so loosely that the slightest puff of wind will send them floating to the floor.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2054116/Marilyn-Monroe-Colin-Clark-r...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/8867440/My-Week-with-Marilyn-the-true-st... ( )

I read this book with a special interest in mind. I'm a fan of Judi Dench's, and she is playing the role of Dame Sybil Thorndike in the up-coming movie based on this book. So I wanted to not only read the book but see the original movie of which the book is a memoir. The book describes Marilyn Monroe as pretty much an annoying, spoiled child. She couldn't remember her lines, if there was more than one sentence at a time required of her. I thought the movie would be very choppy because it was described as having required multiple shots of a scene to get one good enough to print. On top of that, each scene had to be subdivided into many shorter scenes to allow for Marilyn's forgetfulness and nerves. The movie was, however, quite smooth. So whoever edited the movie did a bang up job. You would never know from the final print of the movie how difficult the process of making it was. ( )