“She went crazy”: Anthony Hopkins accused Marilyn Monroe of committing murder on the set of a 1960s movie
Even though he never met Marilyn Monroe, and his career was still in its infancy when she died, Anthony Hopkins still decided to accuse the ‘Golden Age’ bombshell of what was basically murder.
By the time the iconic star had passed away under circumstances that continue to be debated to this day in August 1962, Hopkins was only a couple of years removed from his stage debut in his native Wales, and still several years away from moving to London to become Laurence Olivier’s protégé.
With that in mind, he was hardly qualified to boldly proclaim that she was the driving force behind the death of another Hollywood legend. Even when he made his accusations, Hopkins overlooked several key facts, and as strange as it sounds, it wasn’t even the first time he’d done it.
For whatever reason, pointing to established industry figures and calling them murderers was something Hopkins did at least twice, and apparently not content with labelling the tyrannical Otto Preminger as a murderer, despite cavernous gaps in the logic, he went ahead and did the same thing with Monroe.
“She was a natural talent and got better,” he suggested. “But she almost went crazy and committed suicide.” That was a fairly cold and tone-deaf way of summarising the troubled last few years of Monroe’s life, and when it was put to Hopkins that a combination of factors was behind her untimely demise, he backtracked a little. “OK, maybe not,” he demurred.
Still, when commenting on her final big-screen outing in 1961’s The Misfits, the two-time Academy Award winner both praised and decried her in the same breath. “She was terrific, but she killed Clark Gable,” he declared. “He was so bored with her coming late and all the waiting, that he did the stunts himself at age 59.”
It’s true that Gable did most of his own stunts in the picture, which holds the unwanted legacy of being one of cinema’s most cursed productions for various reasons, and it’s also true that he suffered a massive heart attack two days after principal photography had finished, which he ultimately died from ten days later.
Additionally, it’s accurate that Monroe frequently held up production with her constant lateness, and The Misfits was even shut down while she was hospitalised for two weeks to combat her issues with alcohol and prescription drugs. Those are the facts, but Hopkins opted to spin them into something else entirely.
If you had a nickel for every time Anthony Hopkins falsely accused a high-profile actor or filmmaker of murder, you’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
