Michelle Collins says it’s time to tell the story of Hollywood’s Motorhome Marilyn Monroe

In a town full of eccentric characters, big dreamers and lost souls, a brief encounter with one local resident in Hollywood stood out from the rest and left a lasting impression on Michelle Collins.

Several years ago, the EastEnders star was networking in the City of Angels when a woman dressed all in white made a memorable entrance.

“I used to spend bouts of time in LA looking for work, and on this particular day I was in North Hollywood near to the Walk of Fame when I saw this little motorhome pull up,” Michelle explained.

“A woman came out – she was probably in her 60s – and she was wearing the iconic Marilyn Monroe white dress and blonde wig. I watched her go over to the parking meter, where she fed coins into the machine with these long red talon nails, and a guy yelled to her, ‘Hey Marilyn’. She acknowledged him and walked off.

“I asked the guy who she was, and he explained that she drove around the Sunset Strip all day.

“I never saw her again but it intrigued me. We’re used to seeing older Elvis impersonators but not older Marilyns. I wondered what the woman’s story was and how she had ended up in LA doing this.”

© Michael Wharley

Now, Michelle has developed the mystery Marilyn into a fully-rounded character and will perform as her in a one-woman play that premieres in Edinburgh this summer.

Motorhome Marilyn follows Denise, an aspiring actress with an obsessive relationship with Marilyn Monroe who hopes to live up to the icon’s fame and beauty. She heads to Hollywood in the 1980s but, as her dreams falter, she is forced to confront the painful truth of unfulfilled aspirations.

“She’s like a lot of people who went out there in the 80s seeking their fortune, but she’s also running away from something,” explained 63-year-old Michelle. “She has a difficult relationship with her family and can’t go back home. But what happens if you don’t quite make it?

“She becomes totally immersed in the Marilyn character and she feels their lives are similar, but Marilyn died at 36 and Denise is my age. She struggles to work out who’s Denise and who’s Marilyn. It touches on themes of tragedy and isolation – I think a lot of people have started to live more insular lives, especially since Covid.”

It was the pandemic that put the brakes on Motorhome Marilyn five years ago. The venue had been hired, the photoshoot done, the posters made, and then the world came to a standstill. Michelle’s friend, and the original writer of the play, Stewart Permutt, became very sick during Covid.

“He was bipolar and he had two massive episodes which resulted in him being sectioned,” she explained. “It was awful for him and also for his friends to see. Motorhome Marilyn was the last thing he wrote.

“After Covid, we tried to do a day of workshopping at a theatre in London but it was clear he wasn’t ready. He was happy for us to get a new writer on board, and then The Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh asked if we fancied putting it on, and I thought, ‘Why not?’

“We got a fantastic new writer, Ben Weatherill, who has rewritten the script with elements of the original but a different take on it. Stuart died last year, so I see this show as both a gift to him and a gift from him. He left me his entire literary works – a room in my house is full of them. I’m not kidding, the first script I found was Motorhome Marilyn, as well as a newspaper dating back to the Fringe in 2010. It felt like Stuart was telling me he wanted me to do this.”

© Supplied by BBC

Another of the topics the play focuses on is ageing. Having been an actor for more than 40 years, she has experienced the changing attitudes towards women as they grow older in the industry.

“I feel privileged that at 63 I’m still working,” she admitted. I’ve been in the industry since I was 18. It’s certainly not easy – a lot of women my age gave up in the industry because the industry gave up on them. You’re a leading lady in your 30s and 40s, but then your career changes. Forties into 50s is a difficult age. You only have to look at TV and see how many women are leads in programmes – it’s a very small percentage. And with couples on TV, the woman is usually 10 or 20 years younger than the man.

“We’re obsessed with age, but we don’t do it to men. Women are picked on about their appearance and of course it makes us paranoid. Do I go under the knife, do I have this or that done, do I want to age gracefully? High-definition TV is awful for women, the worst thing that ever happened, because it shows everything.

“I don’t want to criticise women who have work done, it’s entirely up to them, but when they’ve had work you can see they’ve had it, and they still play the same age. There’s more pressure in Hollywood to do things to yourself than there is over here, I think.”

Michelle recalls an incident in the States more than 20 years ago when she was looking for a manager in Los Angeles.

“I took my daughter with me to meet this woman. She was lovely to us, but she asked why I wanted to work in Hollywood, because I was quite old. I was in my late 30s or early 40s at the time. She told me it was going to be really hard for me.

“Afterwards, she sent an email to my agent, saying, ‘Tell your client not to wear that perfume again, it made me feel sick. If she goes for another job while she’s wearing it, she won’t get it. It’s revolting.’

“Only in America would you get something like that happen.”

While she never managed to break Hollywood, mum-of-one Michelle has never been short of work in Britain. She left EastEnders in 1998 after 10 years playing Cindy Beale as she wanted to tackle other roles.

“I loved EastEnders – I was there from my mid-20s and I grew up there,” she said. “I was a jobbing actress before, then EastEnders catapulted me to a place I never thought I’d be, and it led to other things. But I wanted to leave so I could spread my wings and do other jobs. I feel like I did that. I had a very good 25 years, which were great for the first 10 or 15.”

Michelle starred in series including Sunburn and Two Thousand Acres of Sky, as well as touring the country in theatre productions such as Calendar Girls, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Cluedo, before she made a jawdropping return as Cindy Beale two years ago.

Her character had supposedly died off-screen during childbirth, but the new storyline revealed she had actually been in witness protection and was living in Spain.

“I never thought I was going back,” she added. “I wondered if the public would want me back. It took a year from when the producers first asked me. I’ve loved it. I’d been away for so long, working as a jobbing actor, and I think they understand why I need to go off and do something else, because I get itchy feet. When you’ve gone away and had the experience of doing something else, you come back feeling re-energised.

“I want to be scared, I want to be challenged, and I want to be outside of my comfort zone. This feels like the right time for Motorhome Marilyn, like it’s meant to be.”

‘It’ll be a tough summer’

Michelle Collins says preparing for her first one-woman play is just like studying for exams.

“People ask how I’m going to learn it all, but it’s like revising for school – it’s boring but you get your head down and get on with it,” she said. “I’ll still be doing EastEnders while I’m rehearsing for Motorhome Marilyn, so it’s tough.”

Michelle has already visited Edinburgh to scope out the performance space where she’ll spend almost every day in August.

“I was knocking on the door for 15 minutes, but of course it’s still a university just now. I was lucky to meet a janitor, George, who showed me around.

“I feel like the Fringe is like Glastonbury for the arts. It’s a really cool place – I’ve been as a visitor but I missed out on roles there when I was younger.

“I’m doing the full run and only taking one day off. We work hard on EastEnders, where I can do 12 or 13 scenes in one day, and I’ve worked in theatre doing eight shows a week. Those are hard slogs, but this is only for a month and it’s just one show a day. I think I’d be silly to say I need two days off a week. I’m under no illusions that it’ll be difficult, but I like a challenge.

“Hopefully I’ll be OK – ask me in September and I might say never again!”

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Motorhome Marilyn, Doonstairs – Gilded Balloon, July 30-Aug 25, (except 13th), Edinburgh