Back in 2010, it was announced that Naomi Watts would star as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's sprawling, fictionalised biography of the same name, to be written and directed by Australian Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; This Much I Know to Be True).
Folding in the icon's family history of mental illness and a childhood marred by neglect and abuse, Oates constructed her protagonist as a woman divided: the sunny, sexed-up persona Marilyn Monroe, screen goddess, versus Norma Jeane Mortensen (aka Norma Jeane Baker), the shy, stuttering girl next door, fatherless and all but abandoned by a mother who would spend most of her daughter's life in a psychiatric institution.
The growing chasm between these two selves – public-facing and private – could only resolve in tragedy; whether by an intentional or accidental act of self-destruction, Monroe was dead at 36. Her body was found in bed at her recently purchased Brentwood, Los Angeles home in the small hours of August 5, 1962, phone in hand and a riot of pill bottles crowding the night-stand.
