My Week with Marilyn

 Michelle Williams was the only actress that producers met with during the casting process of "My Week with Marilyn" (2011), and director Simon Curtis said she was the only actress he had sought for the role. She committed to the film two years before production began.

Williams told Adam Green of Vogue that the notion of portraying Monroe was daunting, but as she finished reading the script, she knew she wanted the role.

"As soon as I finished the script, I knew that I wanted to do it, and then I spent six months trying to talk myself out of it. But I always knew that I never really had a choice. I've started to believe that you get the piece of material that you were ready for."

She then spent six months reading biographies, diaries, letters, poems, and notes about and from Monroe. She also looked at photographs, watched her films, and listened to recordings.

"I'd go to bed every night with a stack of books next to me. And I'd fall asleep to movies of her. It was like when you were a kid and you'd put a book under your pillow hoping you'd get it by osmosis."

Williams had to gain weight for the role, and she worked with a choreographer to help perfect Monroe's walking.

"Unfortunately, (the weight) went right to my face. So at some point it became a question of, Do I want my face to look like Marilyn Monroe's or my hips? ... It felt like being reborn. It felt like breaking my body and remaking it in her image, learning how she walked and talked and held her head. None of that existed in my physical memory, and I knew I needed as much time as possible to make it part of me."

Williams won a Golden Globe for Best Actress - Comedy or Musical in 2012 for her performance in this movie. Marilyn Monroe won the same award in 1960 for "Some Like It Hot" (1959). Williams was also nominated for a BAFTA Best Actress Award for playing Monroe during the filming of "The Prince and the Showgirl" (1957). Monroe was nominated for a BAFTA award for "The Prince and the Showgirl," for Best Foreign Actress.

"The expectation to be beautiful always makes me feel ugly because I feel like I can't live up to it. But I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practicing my wiggle. There were three or four men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing that they were watching me come and feeling that they were watching me go - and for the very first time I glimpsed some idea of the pleasure I could take in that kind of attention; not their pleasure but my pleasure. And I thought, Oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach...it was lovely to connect with that happy, free Marilyn I knew as a little girl."