The Marilyn Monroe story has been told several times, and folks familiar with it know that her onscreen success masked a troubling, terrifying, and ultimately doomed life offscreen. This weekend, Lifetime adapts J. Randy Taraborrelli’s 2009 bestseller, “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe,” which sheds light on a story that was only revealed later on–Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, was still alive and well despite the studio system’s assertion that she had died years earlier, and she and her demons plagued Marilyn until her death.
Kelli Garner (Pan Am) headlines the two-night miniseries as Marilyn, and Susan Sarandon plays Gladys. The rest of the impressive cast includes Sarandon’s daughter Eva Amurri Martino (Californication) as the younger Gladys, Jeffrey Dean Morgan (currently on HISTORY’s Texas Rising and on CBS this summer in Extant) as Joe DiMaggio, Emily Watson as one of Gladys’s close friends, and Jack Noseworthy as the therapist whose sessions with Marilyn frame the story.
Here’s the formal logline: Young Norma Jeane Mortenson battles a lonely and loveless existence with an absent mother. Despite the odds, Norma Jeane blossoms into a funny, smart and ambitious woman and soon reinvents herself as Marilyn Monroe. She revels in stardom, but the outside world never truly sees or understands the real Marilyn, a woman so different from her public persona. As her fame grows, all three of her marriages crumble. Unable to control her inner demons and the onslaught of mental illness inherited from her mother, whom she still takes care of, her obsession with President John F. Kennedy drives her into an insane asylum. Still, she gives the performance of her life, successfully hiding her darkest secrets from the world.
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe airs Saturday and Sunday on Lifetime at 8/7c. Here is a sneak peek.
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