Blonde AMBITION

As Blonde hits cinemas, EMMA JOHNSON learns how Bond girl Ana de Armas stepped up to the challenge of playing Marilyn Monroe

SHE was the ultimate sex symbol. The original blonde bombshell who women wanted to be and men wanted to be with.

For more than seven decades we have been fascinated with Marilyn Monroe and now we are to get what is billed as a warts and all look at the woman behind the legend in new movie, Blonde.

Stepping into the peep-toe shoes of the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes star is no mean feat. But Bond girl Ana de Armas, 34, was up for the challenge.

“I was looking for a dramatic role to show more of my range as an actress,” reveals the No Time to Die star. “I certainly didn’t think it would be playing Marilyn Monroe, but this is very different from any other movie or story about her that you’ve ever seen.”

Written and directed by New Zealand-born Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik, Blonde is described as a bold reimagining of the life of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons.

Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, the movie takes us from Marilyn’s volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, to her tragic death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, aged just 36.

Co-starring Bobby Cannavale, Adrien Brody and Julianne Nicholson, the Netflix production blurs fact and fiction to explore the widening split between the Some Like it Hot star’s public and private personas.

“It’s not a biopic, but it is emotionally real,” says Ana. “[the director] Andrew understood the trauma she experienced in her childhood and how that impacted her life. I saw in her someone who, as famous as she was, was also very vulnerable… I connected to that vulnerability.”