Michelle Williams is paying tribute to one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, the late Marilyn Monroe, on the cover of Vogue October 2020. Marilyn’s iconic beauty and sex appeal still manages to inspire, 40 years after her death, and Michelle Williams’ natural beauty, elegance and sensuality made her a perfect candidate to try and bring Norma Jean’s sex-appeal back into the spotlight.
The project Michelle Williams embarked on, titled My Week with Marilyn, required a huge transformation, but Michelle’s natural beauty made this transformation seem effortless. In the interview with Vogue, Michelle says that: “As soon as I finished the script, I knew that I wanted to do it, and then I spent six months trying to talk myself out of it, but I always knew that I never really had a choice. I’ve started to believe that you get the piece of material that you were ready for.”
‘My Week with Marilyn’ chronicles the story behind the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl, a comedy in which the late actress starred along with Sir Laurence Olivier. The story is based on some memoirs collected by late documentary filmmaker Colin Clark.
Michelle’s amazing beauty, gorgeous body, silky skin and confidence come quite close to Marilyn Monroe’s characteristics, so no wonder that Michelle managed to get into her character perfectly, but not without hard work. Marilyn is a true icon, an sex symbol that still manages to attract the same amount of attention dead as when she was alive (one of her dresses was recently sold for $4.6 million).
Apparently, it took Michelle Williams six months to research and get ‘into the skin’ of her character, and all the hard work paid off well, as you can see in the amazing pictorial in Vogue. Michelle said: “I’d go to bed every night with a stack of books next to me and I’d fall asleep to movies of her. It was like when you were a kid and you’d put a book under your pillow hoping you’d get it by osmosis.”
Besides research, Michelle also turned towards the help of a choreographer to help her perfect her ‘Marilyn’ walk and weight gaining to get those amazing curves that helped Marilyn become a timeless figure. But things with the weight gaining didn’t exactly go as planned as Michelle explains the weight went straight to her face, rather than her hips, so she said: “So at some point it became a question of, Do I want my face to look like Marilyn Monroe’s or my hips?”, so in the end Michelle opted for padding to get Marilyn’s curvacious body.
Michelle also revealed that it was an amazing experience and that she truly felt the transformation take place. She told Vogue: “It felt like being reborn. It felt like breaking my body and remaking it in her image, learning how she walked and talked and held her head. None of that existed in my physical memory, and I knew I needed as much time as possible to make it part of me.”
Find out more about Michelle William’s personal life and about playing the role of the sexiest icon of all times in the next issue of Vogue.
Photos courtesy of Vogue Photography by Annie Leibovitz