The movie Marilyn Monroe hated starring in
Decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains a global icon. Yet, despite being the ultimate Hollywood starlet, the actor’s experience during her movie career was rife with upset and abuse. In fact, there was one film that Monroe actively hated.
Monroe is an instantly recognisable icon. Her role in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot solidified her position as the leading Hollywood star back in the 1950s. Having experienced a tumultuous and difficult childhood, Monroe always wanted to be an actor, telling one interviewer, “I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim,” adding, “When I heard that this was acting, I said that’s what I want to be.”
By the mid-1940s, Monroe had moved to Hollywood, dyed her hair blonde and gained a contract with 20th Century Fox to be brought into their studio cast. After her breakthrough role in the 1950 drama All About Eve, Monroe quickly became the most sought-after actor around, going on to star in over 20 films in that decade alone.
However, throughout all of this, Monroe’s personal struggles are well documented. Her private life was notoriously difficult from her childhood through to her sad death in 1962, aged only 36. She struggled greatly with depression, insomnia and mood disorders, becoming addicted to amphetamines, barbiturates and alcohol to try and manage her symptoms and trauma.
Monroe’s personal struggles hit a peak in the early 1960s. After marrying the writer Arthur Miller, Monroe was cast in a film adaptation of his 1957 short story, The Misfits. It would have been a perfect situation, allowing Monroe to partake in bringing her husband’s vision to life, if their marriage wasn’t so difficult.
According to the film’s director, John Huston, by the time they started rolling in 1960, Monroe was incredibly unwell. In a 1981 interview with Rolling Stone, he remembered thinking the actor was “absolutely certain that she was doomed.”
“There was evidence right before me almost every day. She was incapable of rescuing herself or of being rescued by anyone else. And it sometimes affected her work. We had to stop the picture while she went to a hospital for two weeks,” Huston continued. Due to Monroe’s worsening ill health, as she suffered from endometriosis and stomach issues as a result of her increasing drug intake, the production was repeatedly held up by hospital trips and recovery time.
However, Monroe wasn’t allowed to take a necessary pause. While on contract with her studio, she was forced to continue working. To hide how unwell Monroe was during filming, the movie is filmed in soft focus, with the actor having heavy makeup applied often while she was high or laid in bed unwell to get her back on set quicker.
But maybe more so than her ill-health, Monroe hated The Misfits because of its close ties to her personal life. Despite being written years prior, her then estranged husband Miller would regularly change the script the night before scenes, seemingly rewriting her character of Rosyln Tabor to be more and more like Monroe.
By the end of filming, Monroe hated the movie and her performance in it. Clearly hitting too close to home and representing a time of great personal struggle, she essentially refused to promote the movie, in part causing it to be a box office flop upon release.
Decades on from its 1961 release, The Misfits holds a special place in movie history with a resurgence of success. While Monroe may have hated her performance, the film is held up as one of her most moving and powerful on-screen moments. According to the director, Huston, this all comes from her complex emotional connection to the role, saying Monroe “was not pretending to an emotion. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness.”
The Misfits ended up being both Monroe and her co-star Clark Gable’s final film. Gable suffered a heart attack two days after filming wrapped and died ten days later in November 1960. Monroe died in 1962, adding to the tragic story connected to the film. As a film she wasn’t proud of, it’s sad that The Misfits was Monroe’s last cinematic moment, but her image and legacy lives on.
