My Week With Marilyn stars an award-winning all-star cast and based on the diaries of Colin Clark, the film captures a love affair with the world s most famous woman, Marilyn Monroe.

Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams stars as Marilyn Monroe (Blue Valentine, Shutter Island, Brokeback Mountain) and is joined by a stellar cast including Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark (The Other Boleyn Girl, The Good Shepherd), Kenneth Branagh as Sir Laurence Olivier (Thor, Wallander), Dame Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike (Quantum of Solace), Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh (Che, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller (Mission Impossible II), Zoe Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg (Harry Potter and the Philosopher s Stone), Emma Watson (Harry Potter), Dominic Cooper (Tamara Drewe, An Education, Mamma Mia), Derek Jacobi (Gosford Park), Toby Jones (Frost Nixon, Infamous), Miranda Raison (Spooks), Philip Jackson (Little Voice), Geraldine Somerville (Harry Potter) and Michael Kitchen (Foyle s War).

My Week With Marilyn is the true story of a star-struck boy who falls in love with the biggest celebrity in the world, Marilyn Monroe. 23-year-old Colin Clark was determined to break into the film business and his first job was The Prince and The Showgirl - the film that was set to be the smash hit of the year famously uniting the biggest stars of the day, Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier.

On honeymoon in Britain with her new husband, Arthur Miller, Marilyn is excited about the project but quickly becomes desperate to run away from her Hollywood entourage, the pressures of work, and the press who hound her. For Marilyn, Colin is a welcome antidote and he offers her everything she craves when, together, they escape the film set to get closer in an idyllic Britain.

Simon Curti's director credits include the BAFTA and Emmy-winning, Cranford, the International Emmy-winning, A Short Stay in Switzerland, and the Golden Globe-nominated Five Days. The film is produced by Academy Award and BAFTA winner David Parfitt (Shakespeare in Love, The Madness of King George, I Capture the Castle) and the screenplay is by Adrian Hodges (Tom and Viv, The Ruby in the Smoke and David Copperfield).

The film is produced by Trademark Films and is financed by The Weinstein Company. BBC Films and Lipsync Productions also financed the picture. It was developed in association with the UK Film Council and BBC Films. Anyone doubting the layered, nuanced, and heartbreaking acting abilities of Michelle Williams will find My Week with Marilyn a tremendous revelation.

And Williams fans will enjoy it even more. In My Week with Marilyn Williams takes on the formidable challenge of playing Marilyn Monroe and does so with depth and assuredness, and without resorting to caricature. Williams's Marilyn commands the screen with pain and delicacy and doesn't let go until the final credits. My Week with Marilyn focuses on a small time frame in Monroe's life, right after her marriage to Arthur Miller.

Monroe, already "the world's most famous woman," still feels the need for validation as an actress. What better way to achieve that, she believes, than committing to costarring with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, a film she firmly believed would finally cement her reputation as a serious actress.

My Week with Marilyn is based on the short memoir of Colin Clark, a crew member on The Prince and the Showgirl, who quickly became the confidant of the wildly insecure Monroe and watched a train wreck of egos--mostly Olivier's and Monroe's--collide in a fiery near-disaster.

Kenneth Branagh gives an uncharacteristically restrained performance as the exasperated Olivier, resentful of the "new blood" in Hollywood that the young Monroe represents, and disdainful of her cult-like devotion to Method acting. (And of Monroe's chronic tardiness, which threatens to undermine the veddy, veddy strict British work schedule.)

Eddie Redmayne plays Clark with a sweet, gentle veneer, someone who grows to care genuinely about the complex Monroe. Julia Ormond is clipped and proper as Olivier's then-wife, Vivien Leigh, and Emma Watson shows a lovely gravitas as Lucy, Monroe's acting coach. But it's Williams who gives the revelatory performance, capturing with painful intensity the insecurity that begins to seep out of Monroe like a fearful sweat. "Excuse my horrible face," she blurts out, while looking nothing less than her usual radiant self.

Where does this tragic insecurity come from? My Week with Marilyn doesn't attempt to answer the unanswerable, but instead shines a light on the very real woman who became lost in the giant shadow of legend. --A.T. Hurley