My Week With Marilyn

Sony Music is pleased to announce the release of the soundtrack of My Week with Marilyn, a drama film with a star-studded cast about a week in the life of the legendary Marilyn Monroe. The movie, the feature debut of director Simon Curtis, is based on the books by Colin Clark (played by Eddie Redmayne), who as an assistant on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl in the summer of 1956 gave Monroe (Michelle Williams) an introduction to British life. Monroe was actually on her honeymoon with playwright Arthur Miller (Daugry Scott), but when Miller had to leave the country, Clark was her companion on a week-long escape from the pressures of life as a Hollywood luminary. Kenneth Branagh takes the part of Laurence Olivier, the other major star of The Prince and the Showgirl, and the high-calibre cast in supporting roles includes Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Zoë Wanamaker.

The themes of shooting a high-profile film, the complicated emotional life of Marilyn Monroe and 1950s Britain provide irresistible material for a diverse and entertaining soundtrack. The score was written by Conrad Pope, one of the USA‘s leading arrangers, conductors and composers of film music. His recent credits include work on three of the Star Wars films, the Harry Potter series, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek X, the Matrix films and Memoirs of a Geisha. Marilyn‘s Theme was contributed by Alexandre Desplat, winner of a Golden Globe (The Painted Veil, 2006) and a British Academy Film Award (The King’s Speech, 2011), and author of many other compositions for French cinema and Hollywood, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As if these credentials were not recommendation enough for this soundtrack, the brilliant piano playing of Lang Lang runs like a thread through the whole story and – it almost goes without saying when the Marilyn Monroe is the centre of attention – there are some classic songs: 'Autumn Leaves' by Nat King Cole, a medley of 'When Love Goes Wrong' and 'Heat Wave'. Also features Michelle Williams singing That Old Black Magic as the end-title song over the closing five minutes of the movie.

The film was made in England at the Pinewood Studios – director Curtis was even able to use the same studio in which Monroe acted for The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956 – at medieval Saltwood Castle, the family home of the upper-class Colin Clark, and on locations in and around London. Just as the visual sequences transport the listener back more than 50 years, the music too is a superb evocation of the mood and sounds of the mid-1950s, a window onto a bygone age and a moving homage to a tragic icon of the movies.