Elle Fanning’s one and only favourite actor of all time: “I love her look and everything”
Hollywood often likes to have a flavour of the month, or sometimes of the year, and it’s fair to say at the moment Elle Fanning is probably both of those.
You can say ‘having a moment’ if you want to talk like people on the internet do, but either way, she is very much toward the top of casting directors’ wishlists, with an upcoming legal drama co-starring Nicole Kidman agreed, a new film with Pamela Anderson dropping this week called Rosebush Pruning, and a spot on the Hollywood Walk of Fame secured next year.
Aside from that, she’s going to be one of the leads in the latest Hunger Games movie, Sunrise on the Reaping, opposite Ralph Fiennes, and she’ll be doing a film with her sister, former War of the Worlds star Dakota, too. Busy busy, then.
Fanning also had considerable acclaim earlier this year for Margo’s Got Money Troubles, the Apple TV series about a young woman getting pregnant and deciding to start an OnlyFans page to pay the bills. Co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Parks and Rec’s Nick Offerman, it received eight Emmy nominations, including one each for the three leads and one for ‘Best Comedy Series’ and will be returning for a second season.
Although she was probably slightly overshadowed by Dakota’s success in that 2005 Steven Spielberg sci-fi, the younger Fanning has still had a long old career since the start of the millennium, her biggest film hits probably being JJ Abrams’ Super 8 and the Disney live action fantasy Maleficent, but it’s probably not a surprise she went into acting given her obsession with a legendary screen icon from the age of seven.
Fanning told Interview magazine: “My favorite actress is Marilyn Monroe… I mean, of course, I love her look and everything. But I’ve seen The Seven Year Itch [1955] and I loved that. I watched that all the time when I was little. I liked the dress. I was her for Halloween when I was seven. I did the makeup and the mole and I did all the poses with blowing kisses and all that.”
One of Monroe’s most famous roles, The Seven Year Itch was the Billy Wilder-directed comedy that has gone down in history thanks to one memorable scene in particular, the moment where Monroe stands over a subway grate and struggles to keep herself decent as her dress is blown around by a passing train.
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Monroe picked up a Bafta nomination for her performance as ‘The Girl’ who turns the head of a New York City publishing executive, and the film was a global hit, earning ten times its budget at the box office. Despite that, Wilder was very upset with how the film turned out, because he felt he had been ‘straightjacketed’ by the Hays Code, which in the 1950s prevented films portraying certain subjects, one of which was adultery.
Another issue for Wilder was that he usually preferred to shoot in black and white, which many of his other classics, like The Apartment and Stalag 17, bear witness to, but Monroe was so convinced that she looked more glamorous in colour that she had it written into her contract that she wasn’t to be shot in black and white. She made an exception for Wilder four years later with Some Like it Hot, but only after the director showed her that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis’ drag make-up made their skin look green when shot in colour.
