To begin with, let’s be clear, Marilyn Monroe was a movie star who wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, but lacked the dramatic skill to do so. She should have been happy with the God given comic talent she was given, that wonderful sense of timing, breathless delivery, and wide eyed look that suggested both a naive woman and one capable of carnal pleasure beyond your wildest dreams. She cultivated an image for herself, and played Marilyn Monroe for all of her life.
Monroe was an enigma in movies, a star who for the most part played a continued variation on herself, rarely stepping out of character, rarely bringing anything other than Marilyn to the screen, though Marilyn was always enough. There was something at once sexual the moment she came onscreen, as though her smile hinted at carnal pleasures to come if she so desired, and make no mistake it would always be her idea. No man would have the courage to even attempt to seduce this sex machine for fearing laughter erupting from her. She lacked the dramatic depth of a Jane Fonda or a Meryl Streep, though she was talked into believing she had it by Lee Strasberg, who was infatuated with her while she at the Actors Studio. Strasberg, a notorious nightmare with actors, believed in getting actors dependent on him alone and did more damage to American acting than will ever be known. Monroe’s husband, the great American playwright Arthur Miller was horrified at how Strasberg exploited Monroe for his own gain at the Studio and making every attempt to sleep with her. In his thick autobiography, director Elia Kazan writes about his affair with Monroe shamelessly, making it clear he was among many the blonde bombshell took to her bed in hopes of being taken seriously as an actress. She felt these men had something she nee3ded to know and used her body to gain that knowledge. That’s her business, but it sickens me the number of men who exploited Monroe, (including the Kennedys) because by all accounts she was a trusting soul betrayed over and over by men she had hoped loved her. In the new film My Week with Marilyn it is suggested that Monroe understood exactly what she was doing at all times and manipulated many men through the course of her life. Maybe, I don’t know I know what I have read and most accounts of Monroe paint her a victim.
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