Murder Orthodoxies: Sex, Lies and Marilyn
29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Books, History, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
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The tragic death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 shocked the world, and over fifty years later, the rumours are still coming. In a new book, Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death, author Donald McGovern unpicks the myths and searches for the truth. You can read my review at Immortal Marilyn.
‘You May Be My Lucky Star…’
16 Thursday Aug 2018
Posted in Anniversaries, Fashion and Beauty, Film, Madonna, Music
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Tags
Beautiful Stranger, Catholicism, Confessions on a Dancefloor, Desperately Seeking Susan, Evita, Ghosttown, Into the Groove, Jump, Like A Prayer, Live Aid, Live to Tell, Living for Love, Lucky Star, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Marvin Gaye, Material Girl, Ray of Light, Secret, Smash Hits, Wembley, Who's That Girl, William Orbit
From the age of eleven, my Saturdays would often include a trip to the record department at Boots to buy a 7-inch single. One of these was ‘Lucky Star’ by Madonna. Along with ‘Holiday’, it was one of her earliest songs played on the radio. Each weekend I stopped to gaze at her gorgeous album cover, but my savings rarely stretched to LPs. When I finally bought it, it had a different cover and my best friend (who wasn’t a fan) borrowed and never returned it. Continue reading
Emily Brontë at 200
30 Monday Jul 2018
Posted in Anniversaries, Books, Fiction, History, Poetry
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#Bronte200, Andrea Arnold, Anne Brontë, Brontë Parsonage, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Haworth, Kate Bush, Kathryn Hughes, Lily Cole, Making Thunder Roar, Muriel Spark, Poetry, Stella Vine, To Walk Invisible, Victorian Literature, Virginia Woolf, Wuthering Heights, Yorkshire
Last weekend, the historian and literary biographer Kathryn Hughes wrote for The Guardian about ‘The Strange Cult of Emily Brontë and the “Hot Mess” of Wuthering Heights,’ arguing that the middle Brontë sister was “no romantic child of nature but a pragmatic, self-interested Tory,” and that her only novel (which Hughes read as a teenager and struggled to finish) was a “screeching melodrama.” Published on the eve of Emily’s bicentenary, this clickbait sensation was only the latest in a long line of outraged and baffled responses to the writer and her work. Whereas her sisters Charlotte and Anne have been embraced by feminists, Emily – about whom little is known – remains something of an outcast. Continue reading
Happy Birthday, ‘Lust for Life’
21 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in Lana Del Rey, Music
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A$AP Rocky, Adidas, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, BØRNS, Carnival of Souls, Chuck Grant, Clark Jackson, Coachella, Eðvarð Egilsson, Father John Misty, G-Eazy, Get Free, God Bless America, Gucci, Hedy Lamarr, Jonathan Wilson, LA To The Moon, Lana Del Rey, Love, Lust for Life, Our Lady Of Sorrows, Rich Lee, Rick Nowels, Sean Lennon, Stevie Nicks, Summer Bummer, The Weeknd, White Mustang, You Must Love Me
A year after its release, here’s my in-depth review of Lana Del Rey’s Lust For Life… Continue reading
There’s No Business Like Show Business
08 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Fashion and Beauty, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Music
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A Man Chases a Girl (Until She Catches Him), After You Get What You Want (You Don't Want It), Brighton, Cinemascope, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Duke of York's Brighton, Ethel Merman, Heat Wave, Irving Berlin, Jacqueline Rose, Joe DiMaggio, Johnnie Ray, Lazy, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor, Picturehouse, Susan Strasberg, The Seven Year Itch, There's No Business Like Show Business, Travilla, Twentieth Century Fox, Walter Lang, You'd Be Surprised
On June 1st – exactly ninety-two years after Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital – her 1954 movie, There’s No Business Like Show Business, was screened at the Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton, and will be shown at selected Picturehouse venues throughout June. The first musical made in CinemaScope (a pioneering widescreen technology developed by Twentieth Century Fox to combat the threat of television), it was also one of the last Technicolour musicals made under the studio system model of Hollywood’s golden age. Continue reading
Marilyn: An Unlikely Feminist
01 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Books, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
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In the wake of last fall’s revelations about sexual harassment in Hollywood, some were quick to point out that this was not a new phenomenon. Actress Joan Collins claimed that Marilyn Monroe had warned her about the ‘wolves’ who preyed on young starlets. Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd, who played dual roles in a TV movie about the legendary star, revealed that they were later blackballed for resisting unwanted advances. And a producer on the 2011 biopic, My Week With Marilyn, recalled how disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein loitered on the set while Michelle Williams filmed a nude swimming scene.
Just as Monroe’s glamorous image has come to symbolise Hollywood’s golden age, she has also been linked to its darker side in a way that risks over-simplification. For not only was she one of the first to speak out about sexual abuse, she also battled for equal rights and fair pay, which women are still fighting today in Tinseltown and beyond. Michelle Morgan, author of Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, paints a fuller picture in her new book, The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist. Continue reading
Reggie Lucas 1953-2018
20 Sunday May 2018
Tags
1983, Borderline, Burning Up, I Know It, Lucky Star, Madonna, Physical Attraction, Reggie Lucas, The First Album, Think of Me
Reginald Grant Lucas was born in Queens, New York in 1953, the son of a doctor and a teacher. “Although no one in the family was a musician or singer,” he recalled, “music was an important and natural part of our lives.” He began taking piano lessons aged six, and was given an electric guitar for his eleventh birthday. Enthralled by the “music explosion” coming from Motown and England in the Early 1960s, it was “the beginning of a lifelong romance.” Continue reading
Making Sense of Marilyn
01 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in Books, Marilyn Monroe
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My review of Dr Andrew Norman’s Making Sense of Marilyn, a concise biography and psychological portrait, is published at Immortal Marilyn.
Urban Myths: ‘It’s Me, Sugar’
26 Thursday Apr 2018
Posted in Film, Marilyn Monroe, Television
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Billy Wilder, Donald Wolfe, Gemma Arterton, It's Me Sugar, Marilyn Monroe, Sky Arts, Some Like It Hot, Urban Myths
“She was the biggest star in the world; she had a lot of attention on her, a lot of pressure… there is a scene, when she comes to the door, she says, ‘It’s me, Sugar.’ It took forty-seven shots to make this scene. The film is about that moment, the crisis she had. It’s funny because it’s stupid not to be able to say ‘It’s me, Sugar’… It’s tragic too.” Continue reading
When Avicii Met Madonna
23 Monday Apr 2018
In March 2012, Madonna made a surprise appearance at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami alongside the twenty-three year-old Swedish DJ/producer Avicii. She had enlisted him to remix her latest single, ‘Girl Gone Wild’. “I’ve been here in spirit for many years, but it’s good to finally be standing on the stage, looking at all you people who have come here from all around the world,” Madonna told the crowd. “In my world the words ‘music’ and ‘dance’ are not separated. Electronic music has been a part of my life since the beginning of my career. I can honestly say that a DJ saved my life.” Continue reading
