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» Articles » Reviews » JS Online: "Blonde" Star Hits Mark as Marilyn (May 9, 2001; by Joanne Weintraub)

The first time she saw herself with hair lightened, skin whitened and lips painted scarlet, Australian actress Poppy Montgomery was horrified.

"I felt like a drag queen," Montgomery ("The Beat," "Relativity") recalled recently. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, this is awful!' "

But the star of "Blonde" (8 p.m. Sunday and Wednesday, Channel 58) is being hard on herself. What she looks like in the four-hour miniseries is exactly what she's supposed to look like: an unmistakable, almost uncanny reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.

Based on Joyce Carol Oates' novel of the same name, "Blonde" mingles fact and fiction in its portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the lonely, fatherless girl who became Hollywood's most powerful symbol of beauty and sexuality.

Montgomery, 28, plays Marilyn-Norma Jeane from 16 to her death at 36. In the process, the character is transformed from a lovely but awkward young woman to an icon of almost unimaginable glamour.

"I had so many doubts about doing it," Montgomery told TV critics at a CBS gathering a few months ago. "I was terrified, especially being an Australian playing an American.

"My main concern was that it had been done so much before this. There's been a lot of Marilyn done every which way, and I didn't want to do the standard thing, which was sort of the caricature of Marilyn Monroe.

"For me (the key) was to try and put aside the sort of cartoon figure that she's become, this myth, and understand the person. It was important for me to try to see the similarities in my life, and to humanize her."

One of the defining circumstances of Monroe's life was her upbringing by a mentally ill, disastrously unstable mother, Gladys Mortensen, played in "Blonde" by Patricia Richardson.

It wasn't hard for Montgomery to empathize.

"My uncle is a paranoid schizophrenic," she said. "I grew up (with) someone very similar to Gladys. And although I was protected from it by my parents, I understand it. I've seen it firsthand."

As far as the physical preparation for the role, some of it came quite easily.

Normally, Montgomery is leaner and more athletic-looking than the lush, curvy Monroe. To approach the softer body ideal of 50 years ago, "I stopped working out and doing yoga. I didn't want to (look) cut or defined.

"And I ate whatever I wanted for two months," she adds with a blissful grin. "I was like, 'Bring it on!' Bagels, cream cheese, muffins - it was great. And I actually prefer myself at that (higher) weight."

She was less comfortable with Monroe's screen-goddess pallor. Like Marilyn herself, whose freckled skin was lightened at the studio's order, Montgomery submitted to daily applications of ivory body makeup - "my God, tons, like you'd put on a corpse."

Hardest of all was re-enacting Monroe's musical show-stopper from 1953's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." It took Montgomery five two-hour sessions with a choreographer to get her through a brief excerpt from the legendary "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."

"I watched (the original) about 5,000 times," Montgomery said. "I can't dance to save my life. I'm the worst dancer in the world, and there I was on this set with all of these fabulous male dancers, and I can't even walk in the (high-heeled) shoes."

One thing that posed no problem at all for the Sydney-born actress was the accent. After two American TV series and a number of movies, sounding like a Yank is second nature.

In fact, she said, "I can't do the Australian accent anymore. I (got rid of it for other roles), and I can't get it back.

"I went for an audition to play an Australian (in another film) and I thought I was a shoo-in. And the feedback to my manager was that it was the worst Australian accent they'd ever heard."

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on May 10, 2001.

[source: jsonline.com]

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