“She tried hard”: why Billy Wilder found Marilyn Monroe “very difficult” to work with
Working with stars who’d go on to be remembered as icons of Hollywood was like second nature to Billy Wilder, even if some of them were a lot easier to deal with than others.
His experience with Humphrey Bogart was a particularly prickly one, creating a simmering resentment between director and star that spanned decades. Fortunately, the good vastly outweighed the bad, with Wilder becoming a favoured director for a litany of legendary performers.
The six-time Academy Award winner shared sets with Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart, and countless more, while he was instrumental in turning Marilyn Monroe into a superstar with The Seven Year Itch.
She was already a known commodity and one of the most desirable sex symbols on the planet by then, but Monroe had often been characterised and pigeonholed with ‘dumb blonde’ roles, with Wilder one of the first filmmakers to recognise the breadth of her talents.
Monroe won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’ when they re-teamed on the classic caper Some Like It Hot, which was the first major acting trophy of her career. Wilder certainly knew how to bring the best out of her, but as he revealed to the British Film Institute, it wasn’t easy getting to that point.
“Marilyn Monroe was sensitive and very difficult,” he explained. “She tried hard, but you had to wait for her to come through, to start rolling, and then her tiny kind of inhibition disappeared and after that she was phenomenal, one of the great comediennes. The metabolism had to be right with her, and if it was right, she was a marvellous thing to direct.”
While the public perception of Monroe was that of an endlessly confident, charming, and effervescent vixen, history knows that wasn’t the case. The actor had her own set of self-doubts, insecurities, and issues that plagued her behind closed doors, a far cry from the image that was used to market her as one of Tinseltown’s most smouldering stars.
Trying to prove the doubters wrong and establish herself as a dramatist of genuine renown was a lot easier said than done, particularly during a time when audiences, casting agents, and filmmakers only wanted to see her stick to type. Wilder believed in her abilities, however, even if he had to show plenty of patience coaxing them out before the cameras started rolling.
It’s not a coincidence that two of Monroe’s best and most beloved movies boasted Wilder at the helm, and as difficult as he found her to direct, once she’d come out of her shell and embraced the idealised version of herself it was off to the races and onto cinematic greatness for The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot.
