Colin Clark
Colin Clark was a British writer and filmmaker who specialised in films about the arts, for cinema and television.
He was the son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, and the younger brother of the Conservative politician and military historian Alan Clark, with whom he was not always on good terms.
Born in London, he was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. From 1951 to 1953, he did national service as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force. In that capacity, he flew the Handley Page Hastings aircraft to Malaya and the Middle East.
Colin Clark's first job on leaving university was as a personal assistant on the film The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, an experience Clark later turned into two books – The Prince, the Showgirl and Me and My Week with Marilyn – the former a set of diaries (a TV documentary version of which was also made in 2004) and the latter a memoir of his relationship with Monroe. Clark's period with Monroe is the basis of the 2011 film My Week with Marilyn.
Clark was briefly married to prima ballerina Violette Verdy in the 1960s. Their marriage ended in divorce. He retired from filmmaking in 1987 to write books. He died in December 2002 in London.
Abridged from Wikipedia.
“It wasn't that I'd abandoned her, certainly not in my heart. It's just that there was no one left to save her.Poor Marilyn. Time had run out.”
“Skills are common. Talent is rare.”
“The worst thing is to have all that clout and not know your own mind. If she says her (Marilyn Monroe's)favorite color is beige, that has to be a definite possibility. Then she will be as dangerous as a Chinese Empress.”
“Being efficient is the easy part. Suppressing one's ego completely for hours at a time is really hard.”
“You're not lost in the storm, Marilyn. You are the storm.”
“He worked with her as she was and not as he wanted her to be.”
“My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surface each one of us knows that he or she is unique.”