AFTER graduating, Colin Clark’s first job was third assistant director on Laurence Olivier’s 1956 production of “The Prince and The Showgirl”, co-starring Marilyn Monroe.

Colin’s notebook about the filming provides the basis for director Simon Curtis’ meticulously crafted, lovely, intelligent, nostalgia piece that roves among a flock of theatre and cinema notables of the time.

Adrian Hodges’s screenplay takes us behind the camera to weave a challenging network of conflicting ambitions, expectations, private lives, triumphs and disasters as two superstars confronted each other’s demons and avoided calamity.

Curtis’s film offers a showcase cast, led by Kenneth Branagh, a convincing Olivier (although I kept feeling that his diction more-frequently resembled Noel Coward’s).  Judy Dench, as Sybil Thorndike, and Zoe Wannamakwer, as Monroe’s acting coach Paula Strasberg, lead a cross-Atlantic collection of players that will give filmgoers great fun putting names to.

Eddie Redmayne was well chosen to play Colin, eager to learn the movie-making business (he went on to be a successful documentarist). And Michelle Williams is deeply poignant as Marilyn, the dazzled and confused 30-year-old child, frightened by the people surrounding her professional and personal lives, sweetly grateful for Colin’s unquestioning acceptance of her. Williams has a close physical resemblance to Monroe and while her singing voice is a tad off the pace, her breathy spoken voice evokes familiar memories. Her nomination for an Oscar makes sense.

I liked it a lot.

At Dendy