[caption id="attachment_67950" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier in Simon Curtis's film "My Week With Marilyn." "]
For years, critics have been comparing the accomplishments of Northern Irish actor-director Kenneth Branagh to those of British stage and film legend Laurence Olivier.
After following in the late thespian's footsteps with his own adaptations of "Henry V," "Hamlet" and "Sleuth," Branagh now plays the man himself in "My Week with Marilyn."
Directed by Simon Curtis, the movie is based on "The Prince, The Showgirl and Me" and "My Week with Marilyn," the memoirs of Colin Clark, an assistant on the 1957 film "The Prince and the Showgirl." The film "My Week with Marilyn" is the unlikely, but supposedly true story of how Clark squired Hollywood screen icon Marilyn Monroe around England when she was there shooting "Showgirl," much to the frustration of Olivier, who was co-starring in and directing the movie. Michelle Williams plays the vivacious, unpredictable sex symbol, Eddie Redmayne plays Clark and Julia Ormond plays Olivier's actress wife, Vivien Leigh. The cast also includes Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Emma Watson, Toby Jones, Zoe Wanamaker, Dominic Cooper and Dougray Scott. "My Week with Marilyn" was largely shot in Pinewood Studios where "Showgirl" was also filmed.
Asked what he discovered about Olivier in preparing to play him, Branagh told the Irish Echo at a recent press conference in New York, "I think so much of it was sort of surprising, really, once you got under the skin of it all.
"There is a series of on-set photographs, which was very interesting to me, half of which show Olivier concentrating and directing the film. I've seen [Curtis] look like that and I've experienced looking like that, where there is nothing else in the world. And everyone says, 'Are you alright?' and you're just concentrating," the 50-year-old Belfast native went on to explain. "Half of the pictures were like that, but then half of them are of Olivier . . . by the camera, looking at Marilyn with his jaw open, just like a kid on Christmas morning."
The actor added he thinks the ability to access an inner child-like quality helps make one a good performer.
"It means you're completely in the moment. When you're upset, you're fully upset. All of you. When you're happy, you are deliriously, fulsomely happy," he said. "When I was a kid and I worked with Judi Dench for the first time, that's what I observed in her, this capacity to be wholly and completely in the moment. And, in these pictures of Olivier, that's what I was surprised by. That whatever the grand master of the English theater he was, he was also a kid with a train set, loving it. Just loving it and actually being really impressed and bewildered by how [Monroe] did it, being really fascinated by it. So, whatever masks he then put on and sort of covered up, he basically was a guy who loved what he was doing."
So, what does Branagh think when people compare him to Olivier?
"I'm flattered by it, but I think you couldn't help but fall short," said Branagh, who is famous himself for the films "Dead Again," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "Valkyrie," as well as TV's "Shackleton," and "Wallander."
"It also was the fate of good people like Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi and other generations [of actors] as an indication of just how remarkable Olivier's position was," noted Branagh, who also directed the blockbuster "Thor." "[Olivier] just was THE actor. He was the world's greatest and most famous actor and he dominated in that position for so long that if you ever remotely went near a part that he played before, you were compared to him - usually unfavorably, inevitably. But I decided to just be flattered and then get on with it. This was a strange moment when Simon came to me about this to lay [to rest] that particular ghost by going at it head-on and actually playing him in a script that took him seriously not only as a performer, but as a person. That's how I got over it."
"My Week with Marilyn" is to open in U.S. theaters Nov. 23.
