Was Marilyn Monroe a good actress?
MOST. Under the mask of myth and legend, we sometimes tend to forget the essential: far from the vagaries of an existence hard hit by fate, Marilyn was above all a sparkling actress. By Vincent Malausa, cinema columnist at Plus.
While the commemorations of the disappearance of Marilyn Monroe fifty years ago saturate media news, the risk is to see the essential - her innate talent as an actress - sucked into the flood of celebrations of a unique trajectory often summarized to a few unanimously recognized tags: pop icon, sex symbol, Hollywood legend, mystery surrounding his death and everything.
One of the worst injustices to the talent of the actress remains, however, this cliché which would like the ex-model to have found in her multiple poses for photoshoots the freedom and the creative part that she has never been able to obtain on a film set. If part of the myth of Marilyn is indeed based on her prodigious photogeny, which expresses and crystallizes a power of seduction unlike any other, the acting of the actress in her films reveals a genius of a completely different magnitude.
There is another, less obvious aspect of Marilyn's play: it stems from her neurotic desire to get out of the comic, ingenuous and sensual roles of an evaporated blonde to go deeper. In the same way that she trained in an Olympic way to improve her singing or dance in her beginnings, we know that the star celebrated in all the celebrity magazines of the planet has done everything to strengthen her relationship to art. and culture thereafter.
Tinkering in the unknown
The result of this approach, following her stint at the Actor's Studio in the "intellectual" capital of New York (where she will bond forever with the Strasbourg couple), pushes the popular icon towards more theoretical or technical interpretations ( like her character in "Bus Stop") and above all reveals, beyond her side as a born actress, an obsessive relationship to a very sophisticated form of mannerism.
All the genius of Marilyn stands in this gap between pure naturalness and this sophistication capable of the most delicate nuances. A film like "Les Désaxés" by Huston, in which the actress plays with her own cracks (the film having been written by her then-husband, Arthur Miller), is all the more overwhelming as it takes to its climax the mystery that surrounds the game all of magic, ruptures and weirdness of Marilyn.
We find there this spontaneity and this melancholy which is consumed in a kind of waking nightmare, but also a way of tinkering in the unknown, groping between emotional improvisation and the hysterical method of the Actor's Studio which would soon invade Hollywood. . All the modernity of Marilyn Monroe's play finds there an almost unbearable degree of grace of beauty. It was perhaps said, from this fatal shooting saturated with curses, that Marilyn's dramatic genius would not recover from such a summit.
Sensuality and spontaneity
We have to review those films where Marilyn has not yet exploded as a universal sex symbol, from her role as a deranged babysitter in "Troublez-moi tonight", with a black glow, to her wonderful bursts in "When the Sleeping Town "from Huston," Eve "from Mankiewicz or" Honey I feel myself getting younger "by Hawks. They already reveal the very nature, sparkling, impetuous and wild, of Marilyn's play: a presence which detonates and shatters the fiction, pure aura of freshness and sensuality which disrupts the limits of the frame and the staging.
The miracle of Marilyn's presence on the screen is indisputable, there is an obviousness in her that escapes all control and touches on these primitive notions of appearance and rapture which go back to the source of cinema: it is the most famous facet of a game which will find its apotheosis in Billy Wilder's films ("Seven years of reflection" and especially "Some like it hot"). Just like the legendary sequence where Marilyn embraces Tony Curtis ("Don't fight it. Relax."), Nothing can resist these facial expressions, this voice, these gestures, this energy which drives everything that is panic. found in its field of action.
