First Look: My Week with Marilyn

Here it is, first look at Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain, Shutter Island) as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn.  The Weinstein Company has released a press statement and official image to announce that filming has begun.  That's quite an impressive cast list. 

Friday 8th October, London.  Trademark Films and The Weinstein Company have announced that principal photography has started on My Week with Marilyn for 7 weeks at Pinewood Studios and on location in and around London.  Michelle Williams plays the iconic Marilyn Monroe alongside a fantastic British cast including Eddie Redmayne, Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Dominic Cooper, Emma Watson and Julia Ormond.  The film chronicles a week in the life of Marilyn Monroe in which she escapes the shackles of her Hollywood career and embraces British life with Colin Clark.  Directed by Simon Curtis and produced by David Parfitt, the film is based on Colin Clark’s diaries and has been adapted for the screen by Adrian Hodges.

In the early summer of 1956, 23 year-old Colin Clark, just down from Oxford and determined to make his way in the film business, worked as a lowly assistant on the set of ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’, the film that famously united Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, who was also on honeymoon with her new husband, the playwright Arthur Miller.

Nearly 40 years on, his diary account ‘The Prince, the Showgirl and Me’ was published, but one week was missing and this was published some years later as ‘My Week with Marilyn’ – this is the story of that week.  When Arthur Miller leaves England, the coast is clear for Colin to introduce Marilyn to some of the pleasures of British life; an idyllic week in which he escorted a Monroe desperate to get away from her retinue of Hollywood hangers-on and the pressures of work.