When Marilyn Monroe almost played her idol in a movie: “We seemed to have the same spirit”
Although the career trajectory Marilyn Monroe experienced during her lifetime gave her the opportunity to star in multiple classics that are still adored by fans to this day, one is often left wondering about the kinds of projects she would have taken on had her life not been tragically cut short. Fans often speculate about the roles that might have been perfect for her, but she herself believed that there was a role that nobody else could have done better.
Of course, Monroe’s filmography is defined by the illustrious gems that she did actually star in, including the likes of Billy Wilder’s incredibly fun comedy Some Like It Hot. Like a lot of things she appeared in, even her early bit in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Monroe’s on-screen presence and star appeal were second to none, and it almost always shone even brighter when paired with the right screenplay.
That’s exactly why she often expressed that she was waiting for the biopic script that perfectly captured the life of Jean Harlow, an icon of pre-Code Hollywood who was labelled a “sex symbol” just like Monroe was, but their performances and their dedication to the craft were too layered to fit under such a reductive category. In fact, it wasn’t just their professional lives that were similar in that regard, but also their personal backgrounds, which was an opinion shared by none other than Monroe herself.
According to columnist Sidney Skolsky, Monroe considered Harlow to be the appropriate role model after whom she modelled her image as well as her professional goals. One of those goals was to portray Harlow in a movie about her, and those efforts were aided by Skolsky, who used his contacts to get the ball rolling for such a project.
Quite ominously, Monroe also told Milton Green in 1957: “I kept thinking of her, rolling over the facts of her life in my mind. It was kind of spooky, and sometimes I thought, ‘Am I making this happen?’ But I don’t think so. We just seemed to have the same spirit or something, I don’t know. I kept wondering if I would die young like her, too.”
Ranging from Jayne Mansfield to Cleo Moore, several actors were considered by the studios for a biopic about Harlow, including Monroe herself, who finally got her hands on a potential script. Interestingly, despite her repeatedly expressed desire to immortalise her idol through her portrayal of Harlow, Monroe ended up passing on the project because she didn’t think that the screenplay did justice to Harlow’s complex biography.
Before Monroe’s demise, she did manage to pay tribute to the icon who shaped her career by posing as Harlow for photographer Richard Avedon. The portrayal, according to Arthur Miller, was defined by “not so much by wit, as by her deep sympathy for that actress’s tragic life,” proving once again that the connection she felt to Harlow was profoundly personal. It’s undoubtedly a tragedy that Monroe never got to realise this particular dream, and it might just be the most significant missed opportunity of her trailblazing career.
