In her review of Arthur Miller’s play Finishing the Picture at the Finborough theatre (21 June), Miriam Gillinson says that the playwright could not get his former wife Marilyn Monroe out of his system.
Twenty-odd years ago I worked on a South Bank Show about Miller. As I was walking through London with him, he stopped in front of a bookshop window, where a large book of photos of Monroe was on display. “Why can’t they just leave her alone?” he said.
I think that what he could not get out of his system was not Monroe herself, but how she was used and picked over in both life and death by the film industry, the celebrity factory and the public as an object on which to project their fantasies, so obliterating the real woman.
Simon Cherry
Claygate, Surrey
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