Archive for the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ tag
Marilyn Monroe Poster
By Anastas Mikoyan
Who doesn’t love “Some Like It Hot”? Who could forget the capers of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag hiding amongst an all female music band fleeing from gangsters out to kill them in Billy Wilder’s hugely popular 1959 movie? But for many the movie’s main attraction was the fabulous Marilyn Monroe.
Like any truly successful film the final product seems seamless and effortless, but the reality of making the film was quite different – Monroe was becoming quite difficult to work with by this time and Billy Wilder had quite a few headaches during the filming.
Monroe’s personal issues were becoming problematic. She had suffered a miscarriage in the summer of 1957 and her husband, Arthur Miller, suggested she go back to Hollywood in August 1958 to make “Some Like it Hot”.
Wilder had worked with Monroe on another film, “The Seven Year Itch”, so he was familiar with her inability to remember lines, stage fright and tardiness. But on “Some Like It Hot” her behaviour was more extreme. She sometimes refused to take Wilder’s direction or refused to appear on the set. She insisted that some simple scenes be reshot over and over again until she was satisfied. Her colleagues were also subjected to occasional outbursts of profanity.
During filming Monroe discovered that she was expecting but suffered another miscarriage at the end of 1958, as shooting was drawing to a close.
She had a good working relationship with Lemmon but was less keen on Curtis after she heard he had described their love scenes as “like kissing Hitler”. He afterwards maintained this comment had been meant as a joke.
The movie became a huge success and received five Academy Award nominations – Monroe winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.
Wilder ascribed the issues he had met with during filming to Monroe’s unpredictable behaviour. He had little time for her method school of acting and said she would have been better off going to a train engineer’s school rather than the Actors Studio, where she could learn something about punctuality. Wilder was made ill by the difficulties during shooting, and he is quoted as having said: “We were in mid-flight – and there was a nut on the plane.”
In spite of all the problems “Some Like It Hot” was Wilder’s biggest success. Looking back years later he paid homage to Monroe’s “certain indefinable magic” and “absolute genius as a comic actress”.
Click here to see more framed art prints of this iconic actress: Marilyn Monroe Poster
