Tag Archives: Edinburgh

Marilyn’s Week in Edinburgh

Edinburgh’s Filmhouse will screen several Monroe movies in August: Niagara and Some Like it Hot (on the 5th); Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (6th); The Misfits (7th); Monkey Business (8th); The Asphalt Jungle (9th); last year’s biopic, My Week With Marilyn (10th); All About Eve and The Prince and the Showgirl (11th.)

David Mach: Marilyn Collages

 This collage by David Mach – using the iconic British army recruitment posters from World War I, featuring Lord Kitchener, to make an image of MM – will be auctioned at Lyon and Turnbull, Edinburgh, on April 25. Estimated price: £4,000-£6,000.

“The image of Marilyn Monroe, made from conscription leaflets, is another which demonstrates how he plays with mundane materials to make completely different images,” picture expert Charlotte Riordan tells the Daily Record.

Another collage on the artist’s website uses pictures of Mao Tse Tung to recreate an image of Marilyn. It is not the first time that these two very different icons have been combined in art. Perhaps David Mach is highlighting the contrast between an icon who symbolises power, and another who symbolises glamour.

‘Monkey Business’ Reappraised

Film critic Peter Bradshaw, of The Guardian, thinks Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business (1952), featuring Marilyn as inept secretary Miss Laurel, is an ‘ace ape jape’:

“It is part romp, part druggie-surrealist masterpiece, and a complete joy. ‘Monkey Business’ is undervalued by some, on account of its alleged inferiority to the master’s 30s pictures, and the accident of sharing a title with a film by the Marx Brothers. I can only say that this film whizzes joyfully along with touches of pure genius: at once sublimely innocent and entirely worldly…Dr Fulton drinks [a youth drug]; his short sight is cured and he instantly gets a new youthful haircut, jacket, and snazzy roadster, in which he takes smitten secretary Lois (Marilyn Monroe) for a day’s adventures. (The memory of Grant with his Coke-bottle glasses exchanging dialogue with the entranced Marilyn was revived eight years later by Tony Curtis in ‘Some Like It Hot.’)”

Full review at The Guardian

Monkey Business screens tomorrow at 6pm, NFT2,  in London’s BFI Southbank, as part of the ongoing Howard Hawks season. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes follows at 8.30 pm. Marilyn’s two collaborations with Hawks will also feature in a Hawks season at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse Cinema next month.

Howard Hawks Season in UK

Marilyn’s two films with Howard HawksMonkey Business (1952) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) will be screened at the Filmhouse Cinema in Edinburgh this March, as part of a tribute season to this multi-talented director, beginning this Friday with The Big Sleep.

PS: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes will also be screened at the BFI Southbank, London, from February 13-18.

Marilyn and Simone in Scotland

Bruce Davidson, 1960

While filming Let’s Make Love in 1960, Marilyn Monroe lived with husband Arthur Miller in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Monroe’s co-star, Yves Montand, stayed next door with his wife, the French actress Simone Signoret.

The Millers and the Montands were good friends, but their lives soon shattered when Marilyn and Yves had a very public affair.

But Signoret never blamed Marilyn for the ensuing scandal, and the dynamic between these two women is now the subject of a play, Marilyn, by Scottish dramatist Sue Glover, to be performed at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, next February, and at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, in March.

Nobody ever said Lady Macbeth was a brunette…

Holding a mirror up to the notion of stardom, the myth of the blonde bombshell and the pressure of fame, Marilyn offers a glimpse into the private life of one of popular culture’s most iconic women.

1960. Marilyn Monroe is staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel with her husband, Arthur Miller, while preparing to film Let’s Make Love.

In the apartment opposite, the great French actress Simone Signoret waits for her husband Yves Montand, to return from the studio.

Both successful actresses in their own right, the women form an uneasy friendship under the watchful eye of Patti, hairdresser to the stars. But it will become a friendship that will test their deepest beliefs and will threaten to destroy them both.

This new play by Sue Glover, best known for the Scottish classic Bondagers, is an intimate portrait of the life of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic film stars.

After Bonnie Greer’s Marilyn and Ella, Sunny Thompson’s one-woman show Marilyn: Forever Blonde, and with a new movie, My Week With Marilyn, now in the works, using episodes of Monroe’s life as a basis for drama is currently more popular than ever.

As with all MM-related fiction, the quality of this play will depend on the depth of Glover’s research and sensitivity towards the subject, and the subtlety of its production.

To get a flavour of Glover’s Marilyn, read an interview with director Howard Miller in the Herald Scotland today.

‘An Actress Prepares’ in Edinburgh

“Empire film magazine crowned Marilyn Monroe the ‘Sexiest Female Movie Star of all Time’, while People magazine voted her the ‘Sexiest Woman of the Century’. But what was beyond the public image and the pretty face? Now the life and thoughts of the troubled screen goddess is coming to Edinburgh in An Actress Prepares, a surprising and revealing adaptation of Marilyn Monroe’s last ever interview, for the first time ever making its appearance on stage.

On 17th August 1962 LIFE magazine published “Last Talk with a Lonely Girl”.  36 years old, divorced for the third time and now living alone, frustrated by Hollywood and tired of the label ‘sex symbol’, the final years of her life were marked by illness, personal problems, and a reputation for being unreliable and difficult to work with.  In An Actress Prepares, Marilyn reflects on her silver screen persona and exaltation to one of the most celebrated idols of her time, while freely admitting to never knowing happiness. Candid and contemplative, and with her untimely death shortly after, this was to become her ultimate interview.”

Bulgarian actress Irina Diva plays Marilyn in An Actress Prepares (a pun on Monroe’s dramatic bible, An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski) at the Edinburgh Fringe until this Saturday, August 21.

Venue:  Zoo Roxy – The Warren, 2 Roxburgh Place (venue 115)

Time:  22.00 (22.45)

Dates:  15th – 21st August 2010

Tickets:  £8.00

Box Office: 0131 662 689