Praise is being lavished on actress Michelle Williams for her performance in My Week With Marilyn, the true-life story of a young Englishman who enjoyed a brief flirtation with legendary Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe in the late 1950s. Skillfully illustrating the intersections and disconnects between Monroe’s sly onscreen persona and her little-girl-lost offscreen identity, Williams impressively overcomes the challenges of portraying one of the most famous women in modern history, creating a living and breathing character.
However, emulating one aspect of Monroe’s image proved impossible for Williams without extra help. In order to match Monroe’s famously curvy figure, particularly in dance numbers during which Monroe wriggles around in skintight dresses, padding was placed under Williams’ costumes to simulate Monroe’s ample bosom and round hips. The padding doesn’t represent a shortcoming of Williams’ performance, since using this tool is ultimately no different from using age makeup or a wig, but the need for the padding raises interesting questions about modern beauty.
Williams’ real-life looks are emblematic of the ideal to which today’s Hollywood actresses are held. Though a lovely young woman, Williams is painfully thin, to the point that she has the silhouette of a young boy except in very tight clothing. The same can be said of many Hollywood starlets, including Kate Beckinsale, Kirsten Dunst, Kate Hudson, Keira Knightley, Katie Holmes, Sienna Miller, Carey Mulligan, Ellen Page, Freida Pinto, Natalie Portman, Kristen Stewart, Emma Stone, and so on. All are indisputably beautiful, but none comes any closer than Williams to matching Monroe’s traffic-stopping shape.
Beauty is cyclical, and one could argue that we’re simply caught in a historical moment when a lean silhouette is considered fashionable, but the popularity of so many near-androgynous starlets reflects a dangerous societal trend: Since these actresses represent an extreme of slenderness that is difficult for most real women to achieve safely, their popularity endorses the idea that young women must starve themselves to be attractive.
The point of these observations is not to suggest that any of these actresses are unhealthy, since it’s possible each has nutritionists and personal trainers creating individualized diet and exercise regimens. Rather, the point is to ask how we got here. More specifically, isn’t it hypocritical that we still consider Marilyn Monroe an icon of feminine beauty even though she would be labeled “fat” if she were working in contemporary Hollywood? Furthermore, when did the ideal of Hollywood glamour become a beautiful face attached to a stick-figure body? In other words, when did old-fashioned sex appeal become passé?
Numerous examples indicate the public still appreciates women with bombshell bodies, even though these women do not enjoy the same ubiquity as their less curvaceous counterparts.
TV star Sofía Vergara, of Modern Family fame, has scored endorsement deals and feature-film roles by showcasing her va-va-voom body in tight, low-cut dresses. Vast swaths of the Internet are dedicated to scrutinizing images of Kat Dennings, Scarlett Johansson, and Amanda Seyfried, who have hourglass figures. Another subject of extensive online study, Mad Men star Christina Hendricks, is a red-carpet favorite because when her voluptuous body is poured into an evening gown, she evokes studio-era screen queens.
Perhaps most heartening of all, Oscar winner Kate Winslet has become something of a folk hero to grown-up women because of her refusal to starve herself or undergo plastic surgery; she’s also, not coincidentally, an absolute knockout at age 36, boasting real-woman curves that lend her sex appeal a type of substance that is lacking from the allure of skin-and-bones actresses in their 20s.
Putting the film industry to shame in terms of promoting healthy images, the music industry offers many examples of young women who are more pulchritudinous than their cinematic peers. Beyoncé Knowles, Fergie, Jennifer Lopez, Katy Perry, and Rhianna are all considered sex symbols, and all have real-woman curves. (The fact that each of these women cavorts like a stripper in her concerts and videos invites a separate discussion about demeaning images in popular culture; it’s as if women with curves can only be viewed as sex objects, whereas boyish-looking girls are entitled to a broader range of perception.)
While it’s true that a breathtaking body has never been enough to secure enduring above-the-title stardom, as actresses from Jayne Mansfield to Raquel Welch to Bo Derek to Salma Hayek have discovered over the years, we seem to have reached a strange moment in which full-bodied actresses are the exception rather than the rule. Just a few years ago, slight but curvy starlets from Jessica Alba to Megan Fox were building careers by showcasing their deep cleavage and taut midriffs. Now, the trend has skewed toward lean women who are built like fashion models, such as Harry Potter alum Emma Watson, Transformers: Dark of the Moon leading lady Rosie Huntington-Whitely, and Twilight supporting player Ashley Greene.
Women this thin rarely exist in real life, so the media’s choice to label these actresses paragons of the female form sends a dispiriting message to young women who have normal bodies. And that brings the conversation back to Marilyn Monroe, whose body was “normal” in many important ways. Though she kept trim, she was not emaciated, and though she could easily muster ample cleavage in photographs, she was not outrageously busty. While Monroe was an extraordinarily beautiful woman with photogenic skin and attractive proportions, bodies like hers exist in nature. She was neither a silicone-enhanced Fembot nor a bulimic fashion victim.
And yet when one surveys the talent pool of contemporary actresses who might have played Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, one is confronted by an array of lovely young performers whose bodies are not womanly in the classic sense. Even Johansson, the chronological peer of Williams with the most celebrated physique of their age group, has sacrificed some of her voluptuousness on the altar of exercise and weight loss. Though Johansson is only 27, the lean redhead appearing in trailers for the upcoming superhero jamboree The Avengers seems like a completely different woman from the comfortably curvaceous blonde who appeared in Vicky Cristina Barcelona just three years ago.
To be clear, Williams gives a very fine performance in My Week With Marilyn, and the fact that her body does not resemble Monroe’s is no reason to minimize her accomplishment; had some other performer been cast solely because of physical resemblance, the world would have been poorer for the lack of Williams’ sensitive portrayal. Nonetheless, it says something about where we are that one cannot easily imagine a handful of actresses who enjoy current box-office viability in Hollywood while also boasting healthy, full-bodied figures. Our vision of beauty has changed tremendously since Monroe’s time, and not for the better.