By Harry Haun
03 Dec 2011

	Monroe and Olivier in "The Prince and the Showgirl."
	Warner

Olivier's shaky psyche at the time has been documented in biographies and the actor's own journals. "It was sort of a midlife crisis," characterizes Branagh. "He came to the project full of expectations for the character he had played on stage with his wife — tricky conversation they must have had when he told her who would play it in the movie! He had serious knowledge of everything that worked — a year's worth of hearing the laughs. He knew every line that worked, every way to time it.

"I think he was expecting when they met in New York six months before the film he and Monroe would get on famously. But, when she arrived, she started to make him feel old — creaky — and, aside from turning up late and doing all the things that were anathema to him, she also apparently had a throwaway gift as a light comedienne — hard work if you were on the set, but seemingly effortless in the finished film. It's hard to imagine that she could have been any trouble at all she's so delightful."

In contrast, Olivier came off a stuffy sparring-partner. "I think he absolutely had a view on this kind of indistinct, East-European accent and that kind of character. The responsibilities of directing, and dealing with, her meant he was fairly inflexible about his character. To me, he is always riveting. I think he is magnetic in it, but I think it is perhaps a brilliantly misguided performance for the eventual movie."

The artist in agitation is Branagh's main meal here, but he was surprised to find some sunny contrasts in Olivier as well. "Despite it's clearly the time in the movie when we see all of the frustrations he had, I found that we also see other moments once we get under the skin of it all. There's a series of on-set photographs that were particularly interesting to me. Half of them have Olivier being very concentrated, as one would be directing the film, and half of them are Olivier as a kid by the camera, looking at Marilyn with his jaw open just like a kid on Christmas morning.

"That thing that Michelle said about this issue that makes greatness in actors or performers — sometimes I think it is to do with access to a child-like quality that means they're completely in the moment. When you're upset, you're fully upset — all of you. When you're happy, you're deliriously, fulsomely happy. When I was a kid first working with Judi Dench, that's what I observed in her — this capacity to be wholly in the moment. In these pictures of Olivier, that's what I was surprised by. Whatever the grand master of the English theatre was, he was also a kid with a train set, loving it, just loving it — and actually being really impressed and bewildered by how she did it, really fascinated by that. Whatever masks he put on — "Cut," "Well done," whatever — he was basically a guy who loved what he was doing."

Read Playbill.com's recent Stage to Screens conversation with Ralph Fiennes, who talks about directing and starring the in the new feature film "Coriolanus."