By Harry Haun
03 Dec 2011

	Michelle Williams in "My Week With Marilyn."
	photo by Laurence Cendrowicz – © 2011 The Weinstein Company

Their teaming may have had a neutralizing effect, but Olivier and Monroe went next into what may well be their best work — he on stage and screen as Archie Rice in The Entertainer, she as Sugar in Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot."

The "aggro" that Olivier went through to get Monroe to sparkle and shine for the camera affected (read: diminished) his own performance, and, as a result, she waltzed off with the picture, winning Italy's David di Donatello Prize and France's Crystal Star Award for her unplanned upstaging. Academy Awards were never within her reach. The closest she ever came to an Oscar was in passing out one for Best Sound Recording at the 1951 ceremonies to one of her own ("All About Eve"). The possibility exists she may get there yet — as a character, played by Michelle Williams.

Broadway's Kathleen Marshall, who choreographed some of Monroe's better-known numbers for Williams to do in the picture, has called Williams a natural for musicals, despite the actress' protestations to the contrary. "I'm not a singer or a dancer," Williams said in a recent press conference. "I haven't been on a stage doing both of those since I was ten years old. In some ways, because of that, I felt like — when I was able to put the nerves aside — I really felt a tremendous outpouring of joy. I felt like a little girl whose dreams came true for the first time, and I was able to tap into what I would imagine made Marilyn Monroe so luminous in those singing and dancing numbers.

	Kathleen Marshall
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

"What I experienced was that, when you're in that state, your critical mind has to turn off. There's no room for it because you're remembering steps and lyrics — it's like trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time — and maybe that's what makes those performances of hers so magical: she's not thinking."

After the Monroe ordeal, Olivier directed only two movies. Both were filmed records of Chekhov plays he had helmed on stage, and, in both, he also played doctor-in-the-house: Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya and Dr. Chebutykin in Three Sisters. A 19-year-old Branagh, woefully too young for the 60-ish Chebutykin, dashed off an S.O.S. to Olivier, asking for advice and getting it — his one brush with the great actor.

"I got his address out of Who's Who in the Theatre," Branagh recalls, in a chat with Playbill.com, "and I wrote him and said, 'Dear Sir Laurence, Any ideas on how to on play this part, which you do magnificently and I'm so ill-equipped for?' And he wrote back, briefly, to my amazement, to say, 'I don't really have any specific ideas. This is something you must work out for yourself. My advice is to have a bash at it and just hope for the best.'

"When it came to playing Olivier here, I bore that advice in mind. I thought, 'Let's not get worried about walking in the footsteps and shadows of giants. Let's just do it.'"

This is not just idle bravado for Branagh. It seemed only a question of time till he actually turned into Olivier, having been listing in that direction for quite a while.

As director and/or actor, he gamely re-filmed Olivier triumphs (Henry V, Hamlet, Othello) and staged other screen Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour's Lost and As You Like It). For "Dead Again," he even looked like the graying-at-the-temples Olivier of "Rebecca."

Constant comparisons made Branagh so thick-skinned that he wasn't cripplingly intimidated when director Simon Curtis pitched the part of Olivier to him.

 Continued...