Ever since Taylor Swift announced her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, comparisons to glamorous stars of the past have abounded. Released last week, the album is available in multiple editions.
No stranger to Hollywood history, the singer’s last album featured a song for Clara Bow, while Showgirl‘s includes an ode to Elizabeth Taylor. And her recent engagement to NFL player Travis Kelce has sparked comparisons to the Monroe-DiMaggio romance.
But it’s the photo shown above, taken from a video for opening track ‘The Fate of Ophelia,’ which seemingly evokes Marilyn’s bombshell style more closely (although Taylor’s beauty mark is positioned like Madonna’s …)
Ophelia was, of course, a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a young noblewoman besotted with the Danish Prince, but driven to madness and suicide by his erratic behaviour.
‘The Fate of Ophelia’ begins with Taylor rising from her watery grave, and entering the dressing room of a platinum blonde showgirl, in a red corset which Vogue believes may echo Marilyn’s ‘Little Rock‘ costume, designed by Travilla for the opening scenes of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
“I heard you calling
On the megaphone
You wanna see me all alone
As legend has it you
Are quite the pyro
You light the match to watch it blowAnd if you’d never come for me
I might’ve drowned in the melancholy
I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I
Right before you lit my sky upAll that time
I sat alone in my tower
You were just honing your powers
Now I can see it all (see it all)
Late one night
You dug me out of my grave and
Saved my heart from the fate of
Ophelia …”
Swift then transforms into a 1960s girl-group singer, á la Ronnie Spector; an Homeric maritime queen; an Esther Williams-like bathing beauty; Cleopatra, the Egyptian ruler once played by Elizabeth Taylor; a Las Vegas showgirl; and finally, herself.
Writing for Vanity Fair ahead of the album’s release, Savannah Walsh pondered how Marilyn and others might appear in Taylor Swift’s showgirl pantheon.
“Three of cinema’s most famous showgirls—as played by Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls, Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl, and Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl—tend to foreshadow The Life of a Showgirl … Marilyn Monroe played variations of the showgirl trope across several iconic films, including Some Like It Hot (1959), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and finally, The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957.
In the latter, Monroe starred opposite Laurence Olivier—who also directed the ill-fated love story—as Elsie, a free-spirited American showgirl who first captures the affections of an uptight British royal while performing onstage. (Sound slightly familiar?) Like Swift and Kelce, the fictitious couple comes from two different worlds and, thus, face skepticism about their compatibility.
Things weren’t any smoother for Monroe offscreen. What began as a promising revamp of her career—the film marked her first as a full-fledged producer—devolved into a reportedly troubled production rife with delays and creative differences … There were also romantic struggles for Monroe and her then husband, Arthur Miller, the playwright behind Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, who didn’t have the onus of navigating as much public attention as his wife.”
The Marilyn Report 
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