Adrien Brody is having a blonde moment
A movie about Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller launches on Netflix
Brigit Grant is the Jewish News Supplements Editor
Having learnt to play Chopin, speak Polish and lose 30 pounds to play Jewish composer Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, playing Jewish playwright Arthur Miller, husband of Marilyn Monroe, must have felt like a doddle for Adrien Brody. The actor allegedly leapt at the chance to play the Death of a Salesman creator in the new Netflix film Blonde, which is an adaptation of the controversial 2000 bio-fiction novel by Joyce Carol Oates and the experience left him thinking that Marilyn and Arthur deserved a movie of their own.
“I certainly had a very clear, protective sense of honouring a man who deserves his own movie,” says the actor of Miller, who wrote Monroe’s final film The Misfits. Born into a religious New York family, Miller later identified as an atheist and considered antisemitism “a rather normal feature of everyday life,” which is an approach to faith (or lack of) that will have resonated with Adrien Brody, because he was raised “without a strong connection to either Judaism or Christianity,” as his mother was halachically Jewish but brought up a Catholic. Despite all of the males distancing themselves from their Jewish roots, Marilyn still got to have a Jewish wedding ceremony and she converted to Judasim after she and Arthur were married, as she loved Jewish family values and identified with Jews. “Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do,” she said. “Like me.”
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