Marilyn Monroe's stage fright and performance anxiety

Marilyn Monroe's stage fright and performance anxiety expose a sharp divide in her working life: before the camera, acting can seem instinctive and sustaining, while live performance makes her feel watched, judged, and at risk of failure. A public reading in New York turns that fear into a crisis. Although she completes the reading and impresses those around her, she describes the experience as devastating, and her later anxiety on set suggests that fame has made the audience’s gaze harder to escape.

Fear Before the Reading

In the lead-up to a reading of The Playwright’s work, Marilyn Monroe is terrified that a single poor impression will cost her the role. She has been awake for most of the night and keeps getting up to use the bathroom. She says she has taken no pills, only aspirin and an anti-inflammatory supplied by an assistant to Max Pearlman for a sore throat. Her focus narrows to the prospect that The Playwright might speak to Pearlman and have her excluded from the cast.

The marked script offers no comfort. Though she has underlined her lines in red, they seem unfamiliar as she tries to read them. She imagines herself already descending the stairs after being dismissed, as if failure were not a possibility but an outcome she has known for a long time. Her thoughts make the stakes brutally absolute: if she cannot do it, if she fails, she must die. The cold of winter in the city enters that thought as part of her imagined fate, linking the public test of acting with a private sense of danger.

At the reading, the strain is visible. Seated in the middle of a semicircle of actors, Monroe holds herself unnaturally still, with rigid shoulders and her head bent forward. She repeatedly licks her lips; her eyes shine with held-back tears, and the harsh lights emphasize her pallor and the shadows beneath her eyes. The New York Ensemble of Theatre Artists is accustomed to professional performers and celebrity, but for Monroe the unfamiliar room and its concentrated attention make the reading feel like an exposure she may not survive professionally.

Asking to Begin Again

During the reading, Monroe interrupts the expected protocol by asking Pearlman whether she can do the passage again. At the Ensemble, actors do not ordinarily stop a scene to address Pearlman or another person; stopping belongs to the director, who exercises that authority sparingly. Monroe does not know this convention. Her request is at once an admission of inexperience and a direct expression of how urgently she wants to improve.

The room falls silent. Some spectators anticipate a harsh correction from Pearlman, but he simply agrees. Monroe asks again, insisting that she knows she can do it better. Her appeal carries such visible desperation that the observers respond not only with embarrassment but, among some of the women who have studied with Pearlman, with fellow feeling and concern for her vulnerability. The moment reveals how the fear that drives her performance can also break through professional decorum: rather than conceal uncertainty, she openly asks for another chance.

Pearlman later describes her fear of acting live as a fear of forgetting her lines and exposing herself onstage. In his account, she believes people expect her to make mistakes and want to laugh at her. Before the reading, she had risen to go to the bathroom every few minutes. He jokes with her about the repeated trips, and the exchange makes her laugh and relax somewhat. They rehearse twice, a very small amount by the Ensemble’s standards but, as Pearlman recognizes, an extraordinary demand for someone so frightened. He sees her quiet voice as a practical limitation in a theatre of more than 150 seats, yet believes it can be developed along with her acting.

The Stage and the Camera

The intensity of this anxiety contrasts with Monroe’s earlier ease before a film camera. When she was starting out, she could arrive on a set, prepare in her dressing room, and find that the camera brought a different life to her. She often learned lines without conscious effort and became the characters she played, including Nell, Rose, Lorelei Lee, and the Girl Upstairs. Film acting, in this account, does not require the same conscious command that the live reading demands; the role seems to animate her through the camera’s presence.

Her relationship with the lens is described as instinctive, almost mirror-like: looking into it can feel like seeing herself. That mode of performance is not simply proof that she lacks ability onstage. Rather, the book distinguishes between two kinds of exposure. In front of the camera, she can enter a role through an intimate, practiced relation to the image; before a live audience, she must face people whose reactions she cannot control and whose judgment she anticipates. The reading makes that difference especially stark because she believes The Playwright himself may assess her and influence whether she remains in the cast.

Fame, Scrutiny, and the Divided Self

Public attention brings another form of performance. At Schwab’s, Monroe reminds herself that she is an actress and that good acting requires self-control. She observes people turning to look at her new hairstyle and carefully ironed white satin dress, then measures their responses: some look admiringly, while others appear disappointed and return to what they were doing. This scene is not a stage performance, but it shows how she experiences ordinary public space as a place where she is watched and assessed.

By the time she is famous, the scrutiny has intensified. She tells Pearlman that people now watch for her to make a mistake, unlike when she was unknown. Pearlman recalls that she had made a strong impression at the New York reading, but Monroe remembers the fear as overwhelming and says she does not think she could face it again. Her success therefore does not cancel her anxiety. It changes its conditions: the public now recognizes “Marilyn,” and the attention that accompanies that identity becomes a pressure to perform successfully every time.

Later, while working in what she regards as the best role of her career and the beginning of a new career as a serious actress, Monroe is again overcome by doubt. She delays getting out of bed until repeated knocking and is already late for the morning’s filming. Looking in the mirror, she sees Norma Jeane rather than Marilyn Monroe: exhausted in appearance and unsettled by a hostile, sneering voice in her thoughts. The difficulty is no longer limited to a single live reading. The person expected to perform and the self confronting that expectation seem increasingly difficult to bring together, and she feels that it takes more and more time to make Marilyn emerge from the mirror.

Significance

The episodes trace a conflict between talent and the conditions under which Monroe is asked to display it. Her fear is not presented as an absence of commitment: she wants to repeat the scene precisely because she believes she can do better, and Pearlman sees possibilities in her voice and development as an actress. Yet her conviction that failure means death turns professional evaluation into a threat to her entire sense of safety.

The contrast between camera and stage also complicates the public image of effortless glamour. Monroe can command attention in photographs and become vivid within a filmed role, but that capacity does not protect her from the uncertainty of a roomful of spectators. As fame makes her more recognizable, she feels more exposed rather than more secure. Her stage fright thus marks both a specific performance difficulty and a broader fracture between the adaptable screen persona and the private self who fears being seen failing.