Michelle Williams As Marilyn Monroe For Vogue Magazine October 2011
September 13, 2011 by Hollywoodite
Michelle Williams will be playing Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, co-starring Emma Watson and Kenneth Branagh. So there’s a passably-sensible reason she’s dressed in a Monroe costume from the bottom of a Halloween store bargain bin. Annie Leibovitz shot Williams sitting down, because sitting for periods of time is every magazine’s punishment for being curvy (see Adele’s Vogue UK shoot if you need further convincing). The make-up’s… off. The hair’s… off. And the dress looks cheap and ill-fitting around the bust. Yep, bottom of the bin alright. Well, she’s promoting her movie so this is one of several “homages” you’re probably going to have to endure.
On ageing in Hollywood: “I feel like something has changed for me, but it’s a new change, so it’s going to be hard for me to describe,” she says. “Maybe it has something to do with turning 30. I don’t feel as shy or nervous or self-conscious. I have more confidence that I can handle what life brings me. I don’t feel scared to have an idea and express it.” She adds, “I feel giddy about it because it’s a complete transformation. It’s like I’ve found my voice.”
On playing Marilyn: “As soon as I finished the script, I knew that I wanted to do it, and then I spent six months trying to talk myself out of it,” she says. “But I always knew that I never really had a choice.” And, she adds, “I’ve started to believe that you get the piece of material that you were ready for.”
On Marilyn herself: “Everybody has their own idea of who Marilyn was and what she means to them,” Williams says. “But I think that if you go a little bit deeper, you’re going to be surprised by what you find there.”
Michelle on her own sexuality: “Any messages that I got as a child about what it is to have a woman’s body or to be sexual were all negative—that people wouldn’t take you seriously or that they would take advantage of you… The expectation to be beautiful always makes me feel ugly because I feel like I can’t live up to it,” she says. “But I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practicing my wiggle. There were three or four men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing that they were watching me come and feeling that they were watching me go—and for the very first time I glimpsed some idea of the pleasure I could take in that kind of attention; not their pleasure but my pleasure. And I thought, Oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach.”
On how the press intrusion affects her daughter: “That’s what seems the most rotten thing about it to me,” she says. “And I’m going to do everything in my power to make her feel safe and protected, and to extend her childhood for as long as possible.”
On Heath Ledger‘s death: “Three years ago, it felt like we didn’t have anything, and now my life—our life—has kind of repaired itself… Look, it’s not a perfectly operating system—there are holes and dips and electrical storms—but the basics are intact.” Still, she says, in a fundamental way nothing will ever be the same: “It’s changed how I see the world and how I interact on a daily basis. It’s changed the parent I am. It’s changed the friend I am. It’s changed the kind of work that I really want to do. It’s become the lens through which I see life—that it’s all impermanent.” Williams shuts her eyes, then opens them again and says, “For a really long time, I couldn’t stop touching people’s faces. I was like, ‘Look at you! You move! You’re here!’ It all just seemed so fleeting, and I wanted to hold on to it.”
PHOTO CREDIT – VOGUE MAGAZINE
