Status Updates From My Week with Marilyn

“No one makes Marilyn happy for very long. And that’s the truth.”

“You have to perform.”

“There are no chums in Hollywood.”

Notice how she refers to herself in the third person. "Marilyn" is the machine that has to perform, the one that has to hit the marks and please Olivier. But the woman holding the script is just exhausted, terrified, and looking to Colin for a way out of the trap.

“Marilyn is sleeping on the floor these days..”

As Colin Clark pointed out in his diaries, the roles were completely counter-intuitive to what both actors actually wanted in real life. Olivier was a legendary, classically trained theater actor who desperately wanted to prove he could be a glamorous, effortless Hollywood movie star. Marilyn was a massive global movie star who was desperately trying to prove she could be taken seriously as a deep, classical actress

When Colin Clark looks back from the year 2000 and uses words like "goddess" or frames her as this tragic, larger-than-life ethereal deity, he is guilty of anachronism. He is superimposing a cultural trope onto 1956 that simply didn’t exist in that form yet.