We are delighted to invite you to the programme unveiling for Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star —a major film festival at BFI Southbank celebrating the centenary of the birth of perhaps the most iconic star in cinema history.
‘I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity’ Marilyn Monroe
Press Launch and screening: Wed 1 April, 9:30-12:45, BFI Southbank, NFT3
We are delighted to invite you to the programme unveiling for Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star, BFI Southbank’s major film season throughout June and July in celebration of the centenary of, arguably, the most iconic star in cinema history.
The cultural phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe has endured for generations, though she is often reduced to a sex symbol frozen in time, or a tragic figure with a focus on the scandals, marriages and troubles that punctuated her personal life. But Monroe’s achievements, legacy and contribution to cinema stretches so far beyond this reductive view. She was a dynamic and intuitive performer who knew how to use her intelligence and physicality, as well as her style and carefully crafted image, as expressive instruments. She was also a determined and ambitious creative who revolutionised the promotion machine, challenged the studio system and became the first woman since the silent era to set up her own production company.
In the century since the birth of Norma Jeane, we invite you to look more deeply into the cinema of Marilyn Monroe with this new film season, to appreciate her craft, charisma and ebullience and celebrate the fiercely talented woman, behind the big-screen legend, who was truly ahead of her time.
Join us for a season introduction with Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star season curator and BFI lead programmer Kim Sheehan followed by a press screening of Monroe’s poignant final (completed) film THE MISFITS (1961), John Huston’s elegiac anti-western. Details as below:
Wednesday 1 April, 9:30-12:45, BFI Southbank, NFT3
BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XT (Lightbox entrance, Theatre Avenue)\
9:30 for 10:00 arrivals
10:00 Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star introduction by season curator and lead programmer Kim Sheehan
10:25 Questions/short break
10:40 Screening of THE MISFITS (1961) R/T 125 minutes
THE MISFITS Directed by John Huston
US / 1961 / 125 mins
Starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach
John Huston’s tragic swan song to the Western, featuring a screenplay by Arthur Miller, one of America’s most celebrated playwrights, is a poignant and off-beat drama of broken-hearted cowboys and broken-down marriages which proved to be both Marilyn Monroe’s and Clark Gable’s final film.
Set in the Nevada desert, a gathering ground for misfits, burnouts and empty bottles, former nightclub dancer Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe) is reeling from a shotgun divorce in Reno. Moving out to the country, Roslyn is idolised by the three men she meets, a pair of erstwhile cowboys Gay (Clark Gable) and Guido (Eli Wallach) with a half-finished house in the sticks and bittersweet memories of a west that's no longer wild, and the rodeo-rocked bull rider Perce (Montgomery Clift) whom they pick up on a road trip, an extra pair of hands to help round up wild mustangs. Arriving in the desert, tensions increase when Roslyn learns of the horses' grisly fate and the men around her are forced to confront their anachronistic lifestyles and their individual failures.