The legendary actor who hated Marilyn Monroe with a passion: “I think she resented him”
Over 60 years since her death, Marilyn Monroe has never wavered from her position as one of pop culture’s most indelible icons, which speaks volumes about the impact she made on Hollywood during a career that was tragically cut short.
She’s one of the most instantly recognisable actors in history, and while her reputation is tied to her blonde bombshell appeal, the effort she put into becoming better at her craft often goes overlooked. She studied the method under Lee Strasberg, with a young Jane Fonda among her fellow students.
Fonda, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Anne Bancroft are among the names who worked under the legendary teacher, and all of them enjoyed long and successful careers that yielded at least one Academy Award win. And yet, Monroe isn’t viewed in the same bracket.
Part of that was because she died young, at the age of only 36, right when her career was exploding into the stratosphere, and another is for the way the media, filmmakers, and studio executives tried their hardest to pigeonhole her as someone who was used primarily for their looks and not their abilities.
Monroe gave several excellent performances that made it abundantly clear she had the chops to be taken more seriously as a performer than the ‘Golden Age’ would allow, although she did make an enemy when she shared the screen with a thespian who’s always going to be part of the conversation whenever it turns to the greatest of all time.
11-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner Laurence Olivier’s fourth feature as a director, and the first that wasn’t a William Shakespeare adaptation, saw him star opposite Monroe in the 1957 romantic drama The Prince and the Showgirl, in which they played the two title roles.
Olivier famously wasn’t a fan of the method, as Hoffman would discover when they worked together on Marathon Man in 1976, so it makes sense he would question Monroe’s approach. “Marilyn had this ghastly obsession with method acting and was always searching for some inner meaning with everything,” cinematographer Jack Cardiff explained. “But Larry would only explain the simple facts of the scene. I think she resented him.”
To get under his skin, she’d sarcastically refer to him as ‘Mr Sir’ because he’d received a knighthood, and according to Cardiff, the animosity was mutual after Olivier viewed her as “a pain in the arse.” Decades later, his disdain for Monroe hadn’t faded, with the DP making the mistake of bringing up their working relationship almost 40 years later.
“I saw Larry years later on The Last Days of Pompeii, which was made for television in 1984,” Cardiff told The Telegraph. “We talked a lot on set, and I asked him one day what he had thought about Marilyn, and he just said, ‘She was a bitch.'”
Monroe and Olivier were two completely different kinds of actors with completely different backgrounds and approaches, so in a way, it made sense that they didn’t get along. Still, it seems a little harsh.
