Should Marilyn Monroe have won the Oscar for "Some Like It Hot"?

No, she should not have, and she didn't.

She is fucking dead, asshole. Move on.

R2 go fuck a fucking sow's ass, you creepy arse-sniffer, so what if she's dead?

In what way is "Suddenly, Last Summer" campy?

No.

He was DEVOURED!

She looked beautiful after the rhinoplasty, the hair-bleaching and the heavy make up, but her so-called "mystique" was built on a large amount of trickery, exaggeration and self-promotion. Also, the fact that she died young allowed studios to build a legend around her that was far from being real.

The truth is that she was a starlet with an extremely limited talent, who was VERY lucky and became a star while not having much to offer. Her alleged exceptional intelligence, unique acting abilities and glorious voice (PLEASE!) are all fabrications created to exploit her image to the extreme.

And no, she would have never won an Oscar because all she could play were baby-voiced ingénues and baby-voiced half-tempresses.

R6, melodrama isn't campy.

She deserved it for The Misfits

Simone Signoret deserved her Oscar.

Simone deserved it for Ship Of Fools as the imprisoned Countessa

She was the Gaga of the day.

R8 Tell that to Douglas Sirk

She still looked fantastic filming one of the first mainstream nude scenes in her last movie

No. She was not a great actress and showed nothing in particular in that role other than her admittedly dazZling image.

R7, Where did the "highly intelligent" thing come from? Every youtube "analysis" video I've seen on her always makes a point to stress how she was supposedly this incredibly intelligent woman. Some dubious IQ test said she was more intelligent than Einstein. I find that hard to believe.

Marilyn was delightful in SLIH, but third-billed Jack Lemmon walked away with that picture and rightfully scored an Oscar nomination.

She should never have made "Let's Make Love". Shame she never got to do "Breakfast At Tiffany's"

She would have fit the role of Breakfast at Tiffany's so much better than Audrey. Holly is supposed to be a country girl who acts pretentious to hide her feeling of inferiority. Basically what Marilyn was in real life. Audrey's image was iconic but didn't fit what Capote was going for.

Marilyn was limited. She was typecast as goofy bimbos but could play serious and evoke empathy. She was good at what she did. No worse than a lot of stars of that era. I definitely agree her tragic death and ties to famous men like Arthur Miller and the Kennedys added a lot to her mystique. She was also a good person and I don't think she faked interest in philosophy or politics, she wanted to better herself.

No. Bus Stop.

She wasn't a genius but she wasn't as stupid as her image seemed. Clearly she was insecure about her lack of education and surrounded herself with artists and intellectuals to better herself. Her interest in leftwing politics, Civil Rights and desegregation. Plus friendships with black entertainers and gay men showed she knew what was right and stood up for it.

Marilyn would have been great in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

No, she would not.

She was more iconic and memorable than most of the winners of the last 30 years

It is very difficult to receive an Oscar or even a nomination for a comedy, even today. It was even more difficult back then.

There's a reason a director like Billy Wilder put up with her shenanigans. She was magic on screen. She still is.

I love how the cynics point out that she had surgery and makeup to look like she did. You don't say!!! A Hollywood icon didn't roll out of bed looking like that??? I'm shocked!!

There were lots of prettier women, women who were better actresses, smarter women. But Marilyn had a magic.

I agree, R20. "Bus Stop" is her finest performance. She's very funny and deeply touching as Cherie.

[quote]She looked beautiful after the rhinoplasty, the hair-bleaching and the heavy make up, but her so-called "mystique" was built on a large amount of trickery, exaggeration and self-promotion.

Nonsense. If it were that easy to create a superstar (some makeup, some hair bleach, camera trickery and lots of promotion), we would have had a thousand Marilyns in the nearly 60 years since her death. Take a look at her in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." The camera adores her. "Trickery" had nothing to do with it. There's been no one like her since.

Agreed R28. There's no shortage of gorgeous women in LA, then and now. Marilyn stuck out, she had charisma. If she was just a pretty face with no "there there", she would have been dead on-arrival.

R28 nailed it. If it was so easy why have none of her "imitators" ever come close? I didn't realise how much money her movies made for their time.

Shame she never got to star in Breakfast At Tiffany's, Vertigo, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, even Psycho or Guys & Dolls.

R27 I read that Joshua Logan cut her big monologue where Cherie explains her troubled youth and why she needs to hold onto her dreams and Marilyn was devastated as she worked so hard on dragging up her own demons to give a great performance. It was dropped as it slowed the movie down.

If it had been kept in Marilyn might have got her first Oscar nomination.

The 1956 nominees were:

Ingrid Bergmann - Anastasia WINNER

Nancy Kelly - The Bad Seed (who?)

Katherine Hepburn - The Rainmaker

Deborah Kerr - The King And I

Caroll Baker - Baby Doll (MM refused it)

Marilyn herself took the blonde image established by Betty Grable, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Lana Turner, Judy Holliday and made it into her own. I think she was savvier than people give her credit for.

Nope

R33 I doubt you could even name the person who won that year

Best Actress Oscars for comedic roles are as rare as hen's teeth. Sad but true.

I can think of only Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night and Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday (and that one has a powerful dramatic scene) winning the Oscar for a comedic lead role, at least up until Some Like It Hot. Am I missing anyone?

R35 Crawfish for Mildred Pearce

The nude in this thread appears to be fake.

As much as I love Doris Day and Pillow Talk, I'd have nominated Monroe for SLIH instead. Of course, Wilder had to coax the performance out of her, but she ultimately delivered. It's one of the great comic turns in film history.

[quote]Nancy Kelly - The Bad Seed (who?)

A truly strange nomination. "The Bad Seed," a would-be thriller about a little girl in pigtails who murders people, is very enjoyable to watch today because it's (unintentional) high camp from start to finish. Nancy Kelly, playing the girl's distraught mother, re-creates her stage role (as does child actress Patty McCormack) and doesn't adjust her performance for the movie camera. She pitches everything to the top of the second balcony.

For Bus Stop

I don't MM deserved an Oscar for SLIH. Jack Lemmon probably should have been nominated, though. And Billy Wilder deserved some kind of award for making that movie, because the filming of it was a hell on earth due to MM's lateness getting to the set (she would be two, three, four hours late) and her inability to remember lines like "It's me, Sugar." He said jokingly that after making 2 films with MM the Directors Guild should have given him a Purple Heart.

R39 thank you. I've heard of the movie in terms of camp classics, I thought Marilyn was great in Bus Stop so I'm sorry she didn't get the nomination instead of Nancy. She wouldn't have won but it may have boosted her confidence.

R41 Jack was nominated for Best Actor. Billy Wilder also said:

"There was an actress named Marilyn Monroe. She was always late. She never remembered her lines. She was a pain in the ass. My Aunt Millie is a nice lady. If she were in pictures she would always be on time. She would know her lines. She would be nice. Why does everyone in Hollywood want to work with Marilyn Monroe and no one wants to work with my Aunt Millie? Because no one will go to the movies to watch my Aunt Millie.. Marilyn was magic"

Marilyn deliberately forgot her lines as that bitch Strasberg convinced her to be difficult as the Director wasn't taking her seriously. Marilyn trusted the wrong people and the poured poison in her ear.

MM also left most of her estate to Lee Strasberg with the condition her share her personal belongings amongst her close friends. He never did that. His widow (whom MM never met) made millions per year off selling her image, dresses and the right to her name. Bastards

*on the condition he share

Yes, R43, Wilder did say something like that. But he made no bones about how horrific it was to make a film with Marilyn Monroe.

In an interview after finishing SLIH Wilder was interviewed. Here's some of the interview:

"I'm the only director who ever made two pictures with Monroe. It behooves the Scree Directors Guild to award me a Purple Heart,"

How was he feeling, healthwise, these days?

"U an eating better. My back doesn't ache anymore. I am able to sleep for the first time in months. I can look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she's a woman."

Would he like to do another project with Marilyn?

"Well, I have discusses this project with my doctor and psychiatrist and they tell me I'm too old and too rich to go through this again.."

But after SLIH became such a huge hit he actually did consider using Monroe as the sweet hooker Irma La Douce in his film of the same name, a role she was supposedly "perfect" for. Which goes to show that directors will do anything to have a hit movie. But it's a good thing that never happened. Making another film might well have given Wilder a heart attack and killed him, like what happened to poor Clark Gable. After his experience making a movie with her his heart soon gave out from all the stress of waiting, waiting, waiting for her to show up and give a performance.

R46 fuck off. Clark's 40 a day cig, boozing habit and insisting on doing all his own stunts, such as being dragged for half a mile by a wild horse did him in.

His widow insisted MM came to their son's christening in 1961 to show she in no way believed all those rumors were totally untrue.

R47 is an idiot .Gable have lived at least a few more years if he hasn't had the misfortune of working with Marilyn Monroe. And Gable's wife was a nice lady, which is why allowed MM to come to her son's christening. But she DID say that his working with MM "helped kill him." She was quoted as saying:

"It wasn't the physical exertion that did it. It was the horrible tension, the eternal waiting, waiting, waiting. He waited around forever, for everybody. He's get so angry, waiting, that he'd just go ahead and do anything to keep occupied. That's why he did those awful horse scenes where they dragged him at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour behind a truck. He had a stand-in and a stunt-man, but he did them himself. I told him "You're crazy" but wouldn't listen."

Gable had no history of heart trouble. The stress of making that movie killed him.

R48 you are a nasty person. Marilynn tortured herself, blaming herself for Clark's death and had a complete breakdown in early 1961. He had a clause in his contract where he was paid a fortune for each day production overran, he had no reason to stress.

Saw The Nun's Story not long ago. Surprised how good it was, and how good Hepburn was in it.

[quote] he had no reason to stress.

Try waiting on a movie set to go work but you can't because someone else in the movie is hours late. And Gable was doing it in the desert in temperatures over a hundred degrees. It affected his health, both physical and mental, as it did Billy Wilder's. During the making of SLIH a friend of Wilder's named Willie Schorr came to visit him on the set and this is what he observed:

"Never had his old friend seen him in such despair. He was not able to get a good night's sleep. His bursitis, which always troubled him when he became tense, was now tearing his shoulders apart and his lower back was in agony. He was taking strong does of painkillers. He told Schorr that that he thought "Sabrina" had been a headache but that was nothing compared to this. He did not know what to do; he just did not know."

Marilyn was quite something in her prime, but by 1962 she was rapidly approaching her sell-by date: She was unreliable onset, addicted to pills, and her personal life was a mess. She was nearing 40, and the zeitgeist was getting ready for a huge shift. If she had died in 1967 instead of 1962, people wouldn't have cared nearly as much.

I think the world's greatest mystery was how could Marilyn Monroe have adapted to the late 60s and 70s?

I think she would have adapted well, she looked like someone who would fit better in the 70s than the 50s.

True, Paul Newman adapted pretty well. Brando had his brief career resurgence in the 70s. John Waters probably would have killed to have Marilyn in his movies. I could see Marilyn do trashy German and Italian art films too.

......And she should have won a Grammy for her redition of The Birthday Song, dedicated to JFK.

MM could do nothing but play sexpot roles and that era was ending. She certainly could not have become a character actress. By the time of her death her career was finished. Oh there was a lot of talk about future projects but I don't think any of them would have come to fruition. She couldn't WORK. She couldn't remember lines. She couldn't show up on time. She supposedly was rehired to finish "Something's Got To Give" but if that would were ever finished it would have been a miracle. She was done as an actress. I think it was her destiny to die young and she seemed to leave at just the right time, as her career was sputtering out. She had a horror of aging. I think she would have rather have been dead than to grow old.

Isn’t there a film coming out about Marilyn and Elvis living on a desert island together? Can’t remember who made it…

[quote]Isn’t there a film coming out about Marilyn and Elvis living on a desert island together?

Did they go to a desert island after meeting in the diner in the "improved" version of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks"?

R4 return your gay card. And please stay out of our watering holes.

Marilyn should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Gentleman Prefer Blondes over Grace Kelly for Mogambo

Best Actress for Bus Stop over Nancy Kelly for The Bad Seed

Best Actress for Some Like It Hot over Liz Taylor for Suddenly, Last Summer

Best Actress for The Misfits

I don't think she should have, and she wasn't even nominated for it or for any other movie, for that matter. I am definitely biased though because I don't like the movie and have never understood the widespread adoration for it. In my admittedly unpopular opinion, it's just another leering Billy Wilder sex comedy, which I just don't appreciate, and Marilyn really doesn't have much to do in it other than being the pathetic butt of the gags. She had better roles. I have read that she made more money from it than from any other movie because she negotiated a percentage, so there's that.

R62 it's true she negotiated a percentage and it made a shed load at the BO. she gave away a lot of money in her lifetime and had to get a mortgage to buy her little house.

Wrong on all counts, R61. And Grace Kelly was a bad actress, but Monroe didn't deserve a nomination for some lightweight comedy.