Lawrence Schiller on Marilyn and Her Demons

First posted here on June 6, 2012

In an interview for the Miami New Times, photographer Lawrence Schiller talks about working with Marilyn.

On the set of Let’s Make Love, you were photographing her in her dressing room and she asked you, ‘How often do you lie?’ Why do you think she was an insecure person?

Compare Marilyn Monroe to a great comedian or a great actress like Ana Magnani or Bette Davis. I think everybody is insecure in some way; otherwise they wouldn’t be a great talent because they are trying to express themselves and prove themselves to themselves and to the world, and I think Marilyn had a lot of demons in her life. A lot of demons. One of the demons that haunted her tremendously was the insanity in her own family — her mother being in a mental institution, her father attempting suicide, and she herself in pain. I think that inside there were demons we never knew about and dealt with. That’s number one.

Number two, I have a theory — which is based not on speculation or rumor, but based on what I’ve observed — and that is Marilyn was very secure in front of the still camera because she didn’t have to walk and talk all the time. In front of the moving camera, I think that she became very insecure because she had to have two or three things going on simultaneously. But she went to one of the greatest acting schools in the world, the Actors Studio, and she had one of the greatest acting coaches in the world, Lee Strasberg. She was a fine actress, but the world didn’t accept her as that. They accepted her as the dumb blonde. But I believe that that was a role she was playing all the time. Laurence Olivier played roles, Walter Matthau, all actors. But she played the same role all the time, and they wouldn’t let her out of that role by giving her other screenplays. That made her more insecure.