A really big ask

Those were the days of extraordinary fame, extraordinary beauty and extraordinary talent.

In this movie we have three actors attempting to carry off roles representing three of the greatest stars that ever drew breath:

Michelle Williams, pretty, sweet, and with quite a good figure, having a good stab at playing the World's Most Adored Goddess, the Sexiest Woman and Most Incredibly Delicious Body on Planet Earth.
It has been said of Marilyn Monroe that she was SOOO beautiful that it was impossible for her to look plain..... and it is true that I (for one) have never seen a photograph of her, regardless of how casual the snapshot, in which she did not look exquisite.

This is the woman that Michelle Williams was challenged to play. While Marilyn had it all, the beauty, the body, the voice, the sex-appeal, Michelle Williams had to ACT as if she had all those things, to exactly the same degree as Marilyn. She doesn't, off course. No-one does. But Williams had a jolly good stab at it.

Julia Ormand had the challenge of playing the woman who had been acclaimed as the "most beautiful woman in the world". Vivien Leigh. And unless you are the current holder of that position, then it is a mighty big ask.

And Branagh, with his lop-sided face and naturally apologetic manner had to take on the role of the Icon of the British Stage, the Garrick of the Twentieth Century, more intense that Marlene Dietrich, more Romantic than Valentino, and more handsome than Cary Grant.

I think they did wonderfully.

I bought Williams as the sex goddess. I bought Ormand as the faded queen of the cinema. But most of all, I loooved Branagh doing Olivier. There were moments there when I forgot that I was not watching the man himself. And he has been my hero, ever since I saw Henry V at the Avon Cinema when I was 14. Well done!








"great minds think differently"