MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)When Marilyn Met the Queen is the tenth book written by Michelle Morgan about Marilyn Monroe, and her familiarity with the subject shows – both in her evident sympathy for the star and in the impressive level of detail brought to the research ... written in lively fashion, keeping the reader’s attention with a series of snippets that are as revealing about 1950s Britain as they are about film-making ... While this abundance of granular detail is the book’s forte, it also becomes its weakness. The author tends to hide behind the numerous quotes ... Given that The Prince and the Showgirl is not either actor’s greatest achievement, we may ask whether we needed an entire book devoted to the troubled shoot of a tedious movie. If When Marilyn Met the Queen is short on analysis, however, it delivers for the fans. The book is interested not in unpicking the star as a cultural or filmic phenomenon, but in revealing the real person \'behind the scenes\'. Star studies may have shown that this is an illusion, and that, while the star is indeed a real person, she can only be understood as a multimedia construction, but fans don’t care and they can never have enough: what she wears, how she feels, how she sleeps, what she reads, her love life (she’s on her honeymoon with Miller), her health (her addiction to prescription drugs; was she pregnant or not?). In this respect, When Marilyn Met the Queen will not disappoint.
