Marilyn was incredibly clever: Michelle Williams

Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe in a new film says the celebrity was "like a child."

LOS ANGELES:

Michelle Williams who plays Marilyn Monroe in the film My Week With Marilyn believes the late actor was an incredibly smart woman and had control over her own image. “I think she was an incredibly clever woman but also kind of guileless, a bit like a child. She always had such control over her own image and what the world knows of Marilyn — the images that we see, the interviews that she gave — was all very controlled,” Williams said.

“There’s this incandescence, this mixture, this woman-child. She gave the impression of having the body of a woman but the mind and the heart of an innocent, and that was an intoxicating combination,” she added.

Marilyn was an icon and has been an inspiration for numerous books and films, including two diaries written by English film-maker Colin Clark, who worked and befriended Marilyn during the making of 1957 movie The Prince and the Showgirl.

These memoirs now form the narrative for a new film, My Week with Marilyn, with Williams playing the role of Marilyn.”She is an icon, and I must say that I have never been so affected by somebody’s beauty until I started spending a lot of time with her. I have always been drawn to Marilyn,” said the 31-year-old Brokeback Mountain star.

“She has that magnetism and that draw for so many people, so I read about her when I was young, devouring biographies. I’m most interested in her life before she became Marilyn. For me, the interest wasn’t so much in this larger-than-life personality,” Williams added.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 26^th, 2012.