Actress Kim Stanley, who played Cherie in the original Broadway production of Bus Stop – and was dubbed ‘the female Brando’ – also starred in perhaps the first Marilyn-inspired movie, The Goddess (1958.)
The melodrama was written by Paddy Chayevsky, and some think his downbeat portrayal of an actress whose life is very similar to Marilyn’s was prompted by his failure to interest MM herself in a previous script. (Reportedly, Arthur Miller advised her to reject it. Curiously, Miller’s sister, Joan Copeland, would play a supporting role in The Goddess.)
Writing for Backstage, Matt Mazur – who has praised Marilyn’s acting in the past – argues that despite its negative associations, The Goddess was Kim Stanley’s finest screen performance.
“Stanley’s performance in The Goddess represents the archetypal Hollywood bleached blonde’s misguided dreams of being a star, instead winding up at the wrong end of the bottle, wasted on her own demons. Stanley neither condemns nor condones her character’s erratic behavior, despite screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s near-insistent judgments. Stanley never allows him to use Rita as a simple cautionary tale, and her shockingly complex, empathetic performance gives him no control over the character’s turbulent interior. Rita is owned by Kim Stanley, not by the man who wrote her, not by the film’s director, and certainly not by the audience. This brusque defiance of conventionality cements Stanley’s icon status—her Rita lives on as a genuine miracle of film acting.”