My Week with Marilyn

In 1956, fresh out of Oxford, twenty-three-year-old Colin Clark was employed as a “gofer” on the English set of The Prince and the Showgirl, a film featuring Sir Laurence Olivier, Britain’s preeminent classical actor, and Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s greatest star. From the outset the production was bedeviled by problems, and the clashes between Monroe and Olivier have since entered film legend. As a lowly set assistant Clark kept a fly-on-the-wall record of the often tumultuous experience in a journal he published to great acclaim almost forty years later, in 1995, as The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me.

But one week was missing from the middle of that book. For nine days during the filming, Clark found himself escorting an unhappy Monroe around England in an innocent and often idyllic adventure designed to help the actress escape the pressures of working with Olivier and an often hostile cast and crew. In the process Clark earned Monroe’s lasting trust and affection. From the notes Clark made shortly after the episode he wrote My Week with Marilyn, published in 2000, two years before his death.

Here, for the first time, My Week with Marilyn and The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me are published together in the same volume.