How Marilyn Monroe almost made Billy Wilder quit Hollywood: “I wanted to give up”
Marilyn Monroe is one of the most iconic Hollywood figures of all time, with the simple image of her white skirt billowing over an air grate cover or pink dress in Gentleman Prefer Blondes forever making history. With a career speckled with tumultuous ups and downs, the actor was constantly subject to outrageous rumours and injustices in the industry, struggling to maintain any sense of privacy in the public eye and often being wrangled into dodgy contracts by studios who didn’t respect her talents.
Whether it be through her award-winning performances in Some Like It Hot, All About Eve, Gentleman Prefer Blondes or The Seven Year Itch, Monroe became the pioneering leading lady of her generation, ringing in a new era and inadvertently becoming the face of the sexual revolution in America as a result of her typecasting as the ‘blonde bombshell’.
Despite being one of the most successful actors from the ‘Golden Era’ in Hollywood, the actor was often met with hurdles in her struggle to be recognised equally among her male counterparts, eventually founding her own production company and going against the studio heads who refused to recognise her talents. As a result, she was not always liked by the men in power who expected her to stay in the ‘dumb blonde’ mould they had cast for her, with one of her former directors speaking up about their work together and how she almost drove him away from the business entirely.
The screwball comedy is perhaps the genre most associated with Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. Films such as Double Indemnity, Bringing Up Baby, and His Girl Friday became synonymous with the beloved era and added a new level of wit and charm to otherwise classic love stories.
However, there is perhaps one director who was most praised for his work during this movement, Billy Wilder, who was known for his crucial films, such as The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, and Some Like It Hot. There is perhaps no one more influential within this period, with the terrifying legacy of Norma Desmond and the calculated mishaps that plagued the relationship of Walter and Phyllis defining the noir and doomed love story forever.
But the director was also associated with Monroe after repeated collaborations with the actor, working together on The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot. While she was at the height of her fame, the director was not a fan of the experience, describing the production by saying, “I worked on two pictures with her and wanted to give up the profession.”
He continued: “My wife and three doctors begged me to never work with her again. She was a most difficult woman. It was not easy for her to get in front of a camera, while suffering from dementia praecox or whatever. She couldn’t remember one word. Not one! She misreads a line, then breaks down and starts crying. I would say, ‘That’s all right. Let’s try it again.’ But, because she’d been crying, it would take 45 minutes to an hour to put new make-up on her.”
While these experiences would understandably be frustrating, we know now that there was far more going on behind the scenes that influenced this behaviour, with the actor being obliterated by the press and studio heads and trying to maintain a scrap of privacy. Despite his unfavourable words to say about Monroe, perhaps he later viewed her in a new light after learning about her experiences away from the silver screen.
