With a new documentary, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe, coming to Netflix this Wednesday (April 27), press coverage is already heating up. In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Andrew Wilson – who is currently writing a Monroe biography – spoke with filmmaker Emma Cooper and Anthony Summers, author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (the 1985 bestseller which launched a thousand conspiracy theories.)
“I don’t wish to sound arrogant, but I’m rather confident that I’ve got as near to what happened as anyone ever will,” Summers says of Marilyn’s final months, adding that her controversial autopsy photo has been removed from the latest edition of Goddess. “She was something beyond the celebrated screen idol – she was funny, she was special, she was a walking secret, there was always something you couldn’t reach.”
“People look at her like a kind of Rubik’s cube,” adds Emma Cooper, who directed the upcoming documentary. “They try to figure her out, but she was also trying to figure herself out in the public arena. I think there was an honesty and fragility in her core which speaks to everyone.”
“To get a fresh perspective,” Wilson says of his own work-in-progress, “I’m going back to the archives to delve deep into her life as well as talking to the few surviving people who knew her. I will examine certain key moments in her life – and her afterlife – to paint a kaleidoscopic portrait.”
Thanks to Kevin at Marilyn Remembered
The Marilyn Report 