"I want Lee!"

Lee Strassberg (sp?) known for being one of the founders of The Actors Studio and the famous method acting.

Lee was the husband of Paula, the acting coach Marilyn is seen with in this movie. Lee Strasberg was the director of the prestigious Actors Studio, and this is where Marilyn met both he and Paula.

During the middle of her career, Marilyn began to be disillusioned with Hollywood: her only bankable assets were her body and her looks so she was typecast as the blonde bombshell in every picture, usually as rather ditzy, materialistic and slightly loose. Reportedly she complained to friends that her auditions were usually clinched "on her knees", because she wasn't talented enough to get the more meaty roles such as Bette David, Joan Crawford and Vivien Leigh.

Marilyn ached to be a serious actress, she yearned to be an intellectual and taken seriously as a real actress so she enrolled at the Actors studio, where Lee Strasberg became her mentor and friend, along with his wife Paula. This is apparently when her career started to take a turn for the worst as Marilyn's mood swings and addiction to barbiturates and painkillers, uppers and downers has already taken effect: she was very easy to manipulate.

Paula supposedly went to every set with Marilyn, became disruptive and would force Marilyn to do several takes if she wasn't satisfied...if Paula was kicked from the set, Marilyn would simply leave as she had apparently let Paula manipulate her into believing she couldn't handle the set or the script without her.

It was reportedly Lee who talked Marilyn into taking the script for "The Sleeping Prince", a play that was being considered for film. He has told her it would do wonders for her career and show the world how serious an actress she could be (supposedly it was the Strasbergs who convinced Marilyn to start her own production company too so she could choose her roles).

Anyway, in the film Olivier asks her to play herself, play the bimbo more or less as that was more or less what he wanted...and Marilyn is outraged because this is exactly what she is trying to avoid (clearly she didn't understand the part before accepting the role and assumed that because it was a stage production that the part would probably be a good serious role). She wants Lee because it was his fault that she had taken the part.

So goes the story, anyway. It's hard to know with second and third hand recollections and stories.