MM impersonator Suzie Kennedy makes the cover of this month’s Used magazine, with a Monroe-inspired fashion shoot inside.

Finding Marilyn, a new reality series in which twelve contestants for the title of ‘the new Marilyn Monroe’, may be produced for US TV channel Entertainment One with the co-operation of Monroe’s estate, reports Leslie Kasperowicz for CinemaBlend.

Personally, I’ve had enough of these gimmicks and wish ABG would refocus their efforts onto promoting the real thing. Maybe I’m naive, but I thought Anna Strasberg would have more business acumen than to allow her brand to be cheapened like this.

Photographer Olga Laris has photographed a group of lookalikes with a difference – they are children, impersonating past icons like MM, James Dean, and Audrey Hepburn, over at Spanish website BBMundo.

After some truly terrifying MM-inspired photo shoots in recent days (yes, Courtney Stodden and Angela ‘Big Ang’ Raiola, I mean you), it was a pleasant surprise to see this superior effort featuring glamour model Kate Upton, photographed by Sebastien Faena for Muse magazine.

There are also elements of Bardot, Mansfield, Anna Nicole in Kate’s look.  Faena seems to have taken his inspiration from Bert Stern, Sam Shaw and Ed Feingersh’s work with Monroe.

Madonna dons a curly blonde wig in the video for her new single, ‘Give Me All Your Luvin”. M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj (a big MM fan) also go blonde.

The look is very much like Marilyn’s circa 1954. As we know, Madonna was heavily influenced by Marilyn’s style early on in her career, and she had the same hairstyle in the 1990 film, Dick Tracy.

Christian Louboutin – who has designed MM-themed shoes, and is a fan of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Blonde - was serenaded by a Marilyn lookalike at Bergdof Goodman’s in New York this week, reports Women’s Wear Daily.

If you’re finding it hard to keep track of all the celebrity Monroe impersonations, check out this handy graph from StyleCaster.

Film-maker Joseph Lally (The Murder of Jean Seberg) argues that the many representations of Marilyn – in film and literature – can never match the original:

“The greater reality of Monroe was her talent, otherwise she be just another sad case, or one of many starlets. The soul of Monroe is in performance: that combination of comic timing, vulnerability as well as strength, and her precise body language, a grammar yet to be duplicated.”

Underlying Lally’s point about the latest wave of Marilyn mania, The Smoking Jacket features a montage of 13 celebrities in 81 Monroe-inspired poses. (In my opinion, the most appealing work comes from models who may not resemble MM exactly , but have clearly studied her essence while retaining their own.)

TrendHunter looks at Brigitte Lacombe’s portraits of Michelle Williams as Marilyn (in my view, more succesful than the movie she starred in.)

‘“Michelle was as close as you can get to becoming Marilyn; aware of my presence, but really in Marilyn’s world,” says the photographer who has worked on films with Martin Scorsese, Spike Jonze and Quentin Tarantino. “I was there for the very last scene on the very last night of filming, in this tiny pub just outside of London,” says Lacombe. “It was very intense and taut, [the crew was] almost delirious with fatigue—it was a smokey, crowded and elated atmosphere.”’

Over at Huffington Post, Emily Brooks offers a feminist critique of My Week With Marilyn:

“It is a shame that Williams’ Monroe appears primarily as a backdrop for this coming of age story. She is more intriguing than Clark’s character, and could have been attributed more depth. Williams’ character articulates her role in the film best when, in response to Clark’s encouragement that she “see the sights,” she responds “I am the sights.” Marilyn Monroe will never be a feminist icon, yet she was a full person, and an actor in her own story, rather than just scenery in the stories of those around her. A movie that acknowledged this and attempted to explore it, would perhaps be a new Marilyn Monroe movie worth seeing.”

Meanwhile, Queertly editor Oscar Raymundo argues that Lindsay Lohan needs to get over her Marilyn fixation:

“Lindsay, of course, looks full-bodied and beautiful, but overall the pictorial comes off uninspired — a sense that we have all seen it before even for a tribute…If Lindsay wants to be remembered as a sex symbol, she must embrace her own sex appeal and stop trying to recapture Marilyn’s.”

Recovering bottle blonde Beth Cleavy writes thoughtfully about the ongoing trend for MM impersonations – by celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, and professional lookalikes.

“The more you look like Marilyn, the more you become what she so wanted to escape. She didn’t want to be the blonde, red-lipped, wiggle-walking object. She wanted to be an artist, a dedicated performer who should not be just an image. She was human.

I adore all the Marilyn impersonators, I think they have Norma Jean’s ‘character’ to a tee. Wiggle, Purr, Sigh, Open mouthed smile, Quiver lips, It all works in a wonderfully sexual and comical way.I was even offered to do Monroe impersonating but decided it was not for me. So as much as I love impressions, I still think they resemble a seaside caricature of what the lady was all about.”

Steve Greensted at right

Steve Greensted, who worked on a 1987 advertisment for Holsten Pils which used footage from Some Like it Hot, remembers Kay Kent, the MM lookalike who acted as a body double for her idol.

“After the commercial went on air, Kay/Marilyn, John and I went to sales-force conferences around the country. At one of these, when we were taking a short break, Kay said to me, “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.” She had an unsettling way of switching her voice between East London and being Marilyn.

Me: What’s the problem?

Kay: (East London accent) Everywhere I go, I get treated as if I really am Marilyn. I arrived at JFK recently and was mobbed.

Me: Well, milk it while you can.

Kay, now speaking as if she was Marilyn: But no-one will ever want a Marilyn who outlives the real Marilyn’s age.

Me: Kay. Listen. You are a terrific person, very clever and a great actress. You’ll think of something.

She looked at me and then looked away at the table cloth.

I thought no more about it until I read the news of Kay’s death the next year at the age of just twenty-five.

Kay had tried to tell me that she could not live beyond Marilyn’s age. I listened to her aunt on the Radio 4′s news, full of anguish and grief. I felt the same.”

You can read Greensted’s blog in full here

Some fans and critics feel that Lindsay Lohan may have taken her Monroe fandom too far with her latest Playboy photo shoot. Margaret Cho, of the Huffington Post, offers a more sympathetic view:

“The pictures of Lindsay are beautiful, as she is a stunningly pretty girl, and all the bad publicity and jail time haven’t changed that, which is the great promise of youth, the enduring freshness that can withstand even head-on collisions with trains. Her derailment hasn’t been drugs or passing out inside hoodies in the front seats of cars or a lack of undergarments or compulsivity around necklaces, though; rather, the myth of the tragic ingénue has been her downfall, and the Playboyphotos say it most eloqently.

The sadness I feel about Lindsay has more to do with the media’s casting her as Marilyn Monroe, swaddled in red velvet, sad eyes and vermillion lips, and framing her story as if it has already ended. These magazines constantly show her as if she is already dead, and I feel scared and freaked out and mad, like why can’t they just give this kid a fucking chance?

It is a revival of the terrible trajectory played out by Anna Nicole Smith, an eventuality that I hated seeing and could do nothing to stop, and now it happens again with another beauty, and yet we stand by and just watch as a purse gets stolen and a life gets stolen, and in the face of all this burglary we are witnessing on the world’s stage, we are distracted as our humanity gets stolen right out from under us.”

 MM lookalike Laura Nixon, ‘the unofficial Miss Brighton and Hove’, is on the cover of free mag What’s Happening‘s December issue.

Photo by Stephen Potter

Frances Burscough of the Belfast Telegraph was treated to a Marilyn makeover at the Queens Film Theatre, where My Week With Marilyn is currently showing.

“As far as I was concerned Marilyn Monroe is, was and always will be the sexiest woman who ever walked — or wiggled, to be more precise — the earth, and so to resemble her in even the slightest way made me feel as sexy as a six-foot supermodel. No mean feat, when you’re only five foot four.”

Brighton’s very own Marilyn lookalike, Laura Nixon, has opened her own venue in the seaside city. The Jive Monkey, at 5 Steine Street, is ‘set to be a focus for performers and the first port of call for those who want to see quality entertainment or just have a relaxed drink in a non-pretentious but glamourous setting.’

Opening this Friday, December 2, the Jive Monkey is compared by Latest 7 magazine to ‘a dark 1920s speakeasy with the discretion of a gentlemen’s club plus the excitement of a Berlin cabaret.’

Entertainments will include ‘live music, cabaret, and performance art from the unusual and tongue in cheek to the downright bizarre including screenings of cult movies with a heavy smattering of authentic live jazz.’