On being Marilyn — reluctantly
Sunny Thompson hesitated about portraying the actress she calls the ‘ultimate sex goddess’
When Sunny Thompson was first asked to portray Marilyn Monroe, the actress adamantly refused.
“The idea of being compared to Marilyn Monroe, that’s an unfair request,” says Thompson.
“She is, iconically, the most beautiful woman of our time, the ultimate sex goddess, a beauty queen.” Thompson had included Monroe as one of the blond Hollywood beauties she portrayed in her Las Vegas musical show but was daunted by the prospect of bringing her to life in a stage play.
It was after researching the life of the actress (“she was far more interesting than I thought”) and learning that the play is entirely in the words that Monroe spoke and wrote during her lifetime, that Thompson took the plunge.
Toronto audiences will see Thompson’s take on the woman who breathily sang, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in
Marilyn: Forever Blonde running at the Elgin Theatre from Wednesday to Sunday.
Thompson joins a long list of actresses who’ve taken on the role of the woman who married two titans of her time — baseball great Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller — consorted with U.S. president John Kennedy and dom- inated the box office with her dumb blond persona.
The actress’s life, which ended with a drug overdose at the age of 36, continues to fascinate the public, says Jimmy James, a California performer whose impressions of Monroe gained him celebrity in the 1990s.
“They want to feel what it would have been like to be in her presence,” he says of audiences who attend shows about Monroe.
James was brought in to coach Thompson before her play opened in Hollywood. “I helped with the artistic expression, the makeup and the hair.” He says the play is accurate, but there are parts, such as Monroe’s painful divorces, that make him sad.
“When I played Marilyn, I celebrated her life,” says James, who “retired” his Marilyn in 1997 when he turned 36.
Still, producer and writer Greg Thompson (Sunny’s husband) considered casting James in the play.
Thompson conceived the play decades ago after seeing a one-man show about Groucho Marx and says finding an actress to play Marilyn was difficult. “I found actors that couldn’t sing and singers that didn’t look like Marilyn. But when I saw Sunny I thought, ‘Wow, you look a lot like Marilyn.’ ”
Two of the 16 songs Monroe sang in her movies are sung in their entirety in the play, with snippets of others used to illustrate life events.
The most difficult challenge, Thompson says, was “getting to the heart of Marilyn.”
He jokes that he married Sunny to get her to take the part. The play has taken them around the world, including Broadway and London’s West End. There is so much more to Monroe than what the public knows, Thompson says. “Everyone thinks they know her, that’s what bothers me.”
For instance, she aspired to do a Shakespeare play (Juliet in Romeo and Juliet was her choice) and recited poetry, especially Yeats.
She was clever in the ways she attracted attention, Sunny says.
“She saw what people were responding to. When she didn’t get an audition, she went home and died her hair a brighter shade of blond. The blonder the better.”
And she was very serious about her work, Sunny adds.
“She was a career woman. She liked to push the envelope, to put people on edge. She was so much fun.
“If she were around today, she’d be like Lady Gaga or Madonna.”