My Week With Marilyn. Colin Clark

Her marriage lasted a few more years and sadly she was only to live six more years.

      I regret that I never met Colin Clark but I am truly honoured to have made the film of his two diaries. I am grateful for the support of his family and delighted that on their visits to the set they appeared to recognise and admire Eddie Redmayne’s excellent performance as ‘Colin’. I have taken a cue for what we have done from the tone of Colin’s wonderful books and hope very much he would have liked the film we have made.

       The Prince, the Showgirl and Me

       Dedication

      For Christopher and Helena,

       with love

       Illustrations

      Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller arrive at Heathrow, escorted by my friends, the policemen. (© Press Association Images)

      Crowds of reporters force MM and SLO to take refuge behind a counter at Heathrow. (© Mirrorpix)

      Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh greet MM and AM at the airport. (© Getty Images)

      AM, MM and SLO on arrival at Parkside House. My head can just be seen through the window. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)

      MM, standing between Victor Mature and Anthony Quayle, meets the Queen at the Royal Film Premiere of The Battle of the River Plate. MM and HM were almost exactly the same age. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)

      I was given the job of third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl because my parents were friends of Laurence Olivier.

      Vivien Leigh and SLO in The Sleeping Prince, Phoenix Theatre, 1953. (© Popperfoto/Getty Images)

      MM at the start of filming. (© Milton H. Greene Collection © 2011 Joshua Greene www.archiveimages.com)

      Roger Furse’s original design for the salon, much changed for the actual filming. (British Film Institute)

      Production unit photograph of The Prince and the Showgirl. (British Film Institute)

      Marilyn at the London first night of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. (© 2011 Getty Images)

      All images listed below © The Weinstein Company

      Dougray Scott and Michelle Williams, as Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, arrive in London.

      Dougray Scott, Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier and Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh, on arrival at Parkside House.

      Director Simon Curtis talks to Eddie Redmayne on set.

      Elsie Marina, played by Monroe, was the female lead in The Prince and the Showgirl. Here, Michelle Williams re-enacts Elsie’s dance in the purple sitting room.

      Echoing the classic photograph taken at the start of filming The Sleeping Prince.

      Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier. The clashes between him and Monroe entered film legend.

      Simon Curtis, Dominic Cooper as Milton Greene, Dougray Scott and producer David Parfitt taking a break on set.

      Michelle Williams capturing a classic Monroe pose.

      Michelle Williams as Monroe, the icon.

      Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark, leading Monroe and Miller away from the paparazzi.

      While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future editions.

       Preface

      In 1943, when I was ten years old, my boarding school decided that my class should see Gone with the Wind. Film shows were a monthly treat then, and we had already seen several stirring black-and-white wartime epics, but Gone with the Wind was different. It was in colour, it was very long, and it contained some gruesome scenes of wounded soldiers, the sort of thing which was obviously never included in British films of the time. Our teacher took great trouble to explain to us that the film was just an illusion, made up of clever special effects. Nevertheless, watching it in that bare school hall had a dramatic effect on all of us.

      At about the same time my father, Kenneth Clark, had been made controller of home publicity at the Ministry of Information. This meant that he was responsible for extricating British actors and actresses from the armed forces so that they could work in patriotic films. He made frequent visits to the studios around London to see how they were getting on, and I persuaded him to let me come too. His principal ally was Alexander Korda, who was the most powerful British producer at the time, and whom my father had persuaded to join in the ‘war effort’. Through him my father and mother met all the stars of the film world. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh became their close friends, and William Walton, who was composing the music for Olivier’s Henry V, was made my godfather to replace the original one who had been killed by a bomb. Another Hungarian producer, Gabriel Pascal, had managed to persuade George Bernard Shaw to let him have the film rights to all his plays. He came to our house in Hampstead with a beautiful young American actress called Irene Worth, and promised to buy me a pair of white peacocks if I would act for him, offering me the part of Ptolemy in his production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (with Vivien Leigh). My parents said no, but I was not the least bit disappointed: I knew that I could never be an actor, and I also knew that those white peacocks were as much a product of Pascal’s imagination as Caesar and Cleopatra was of Shaw’s.

      I had become completely fascinated by the concept of a fictional idea being made into a real film, which is in itself an illusion. It is a fascination which I have never lost. At the age of twelve I explained this to my father, and told him of my determination to be a film director. My only worry was that all the directors I had met were fat and ugly. To my surprise he took me seriously. Although he was involved in all the performing arts – opera, ballet and theatre as well as film – his main love was painting. He pointed out that painting contains the same elements of illusion and reality as film, and that Michael Powell and David Lean were both successful directors, and they were thin.

      From then on, a visit to a film set was like a dream fulfilled. I saw Noël Coward in a tank of oily black water making In Which We Serve; I saw Vivien Leigh being carried on a very wobbly litter in front of a plaster Sphinx on the set of Caesar and Cleopatra; I saw her again in Anna Karenina – she had offered me the role of her son, again refused; and many more. I was not in love with the magic of film the way many children are with theatre or ballet: I was in love with the way in which that magic was made.

      When I got to Eton in 1946 it became clear that I had chosen a pretty eccentric path. ‘Art’ did not then have the respectable connotations that it does today. My family, though wealthy enough, was as far from the typical ‘hunting, shooting and fishing’ set as it was possible to be. None of my more conventional contemporaries had ever heard of an art historian, and I was forced to describe my father as a professor (he had been Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford). My friends could not understand me at all – many still can’t – and as if to underline the difference between us, I chose to be a pilot in the RAF during my National Service rather than to go into the Guards, and then to get a job as a keeper at London Zoo rather than work in a merchant bank.

      In the summer of 1952, while on vacation from Oxford, I went on a motoring tour of Europe and found myself stranded in a little palace in the mountains of north Portugal. It belonged to an Englishman called Peter Pitt-Millward, and apart from his occasional guests, I had no one else with whom to converse for over two months. To make things worse, I fell passionately in love with someone who could speak nothing but Portuguese. I could not even confide in Peter about this as he was also in love – with the same person. So I started to keep a daily journal in which I could explore my emotions, and my loneliness. This feeling of