Richard Widmark

Richard Widmark is an established, technically capable actor whose professional confidence is tested by Norma Jeane Baker’s performance in La tua bocca brucia. First introduced as a star she meets at Schwab’s, he later becomes her co-star in a film that gives him the leading male role but increasingly makes Nell, her unstable character, its dramatic center. His frustration and reluctant recognition make him a measure of the difference between performing a role competently and seeming to inhabit it completely.

Identity and Introduction

Widmark first appears in Norma Jeane’s account of a visit to Schwab’s after exercise. She is trying to manage the self-consciousness of entering a place where people turn to look at her, appraising her hair and carefully pressed white satin dress. On this occasion, she feels well and comparatively free of anxiety. Widmark is at the counter having coffee and smoking; he looks at her, smiles, and asks her name and whether she works at the Studio, perhaps because he has seen her there.

The encounter becomes an early promise of professional contact. Norma Jeane is breathless and begins to tremble, but manages not to stammer. She reads his penetrating eyes through the image of him she knows from his films and senses that he wants more from her than she can give. She answers with the bright, ringing laugh she has been practicing, and the exchange turns to the possibility that they may someday work together. Widmark asks for the name of her agent as well. The scene joins star-struck recognition to the practical machinery of a career: the admired actor is also someone who can ask who represents her.

The Role of Nell

That possibility is realized when I. E. Shinn sends Norma Jeane the screenplay for La tua bocca brucia. He remains interested in representing Marilyn Monroe and identifies the role of Nell as a chance for her to take a leading part opposite Widmark. The film offers a departure from the interchangeable blonde parts she has been given: Nell is a psychologically disturbed babysitter who ties up a child and nearly throws her from a window. She also attempts to seduce Widmark’s character, Jed Powers, because she mistakes him for her dead wartime fiancé. Nell’s story culminates in a threat to cut her own throat, followed by her removal to an institution, while Jed leaves with another woman.

The screenplay makes Widmark’s part more verbally dominant than physically active. He sees the melodrama as static and talk-heavy, almost written for the stage, and expects his established name and performance to command the film. The most spectacular action, however, belongs to Nell: the child’s restraint and the threatened fall give her the scenes that provoke alarm even among experienced Hollywood viewers. The formal imbalance anticipates the imbalance Widmark experiences on set. Although Jed is the male lead, the screenplay’s most forceful dramatic material gathers around the babysitter.

Performance and Conflict on Set

At the first rehearsal, Norma Jeane recognizes in Jed Powers not Widmark himself but Frank Widdoes, her lost love from eleven years earlier. She finds in Jed the look she associates with Frank: cruel, guilty, and desirous. The role’s supposed tenderness does not fit what she sees in Widmark, but her response to the scene is governed by the remembered figure she has superimposed on him. This distinction matters: the intensity between Nell and Jed is not evidence that Widmark and Norma Jeane share a private romance. The novel shows her using the actor and the character as conduits for another emotional history.

Widmark is caught off guard by the force of her performance. In a scene where a whiskey-bearing Jed arrives at Nell’s door, she asks how she looks, then kisses him with an appetite that surprises him. The narration presents him as unable to tell where Norma Jeane ends and Nell begins. That uncertainty is unlike Widmark’s own technical approach. He follows the director’s instructions and, expecting a conventional melodrama, assumes he will control the scene. Instead, each encounter with Nell becomes a contest for attention and emotional command.

He interprets Norma Jeane’s immersion as unnerving. During takes, she seems less available to the people around her than to the dream governing Nell; the screenplay itself describes Nell as a kind of sleepwalker, seeing Jed as the dead fiancé rather than as the man before her. Widmark’s practical acting style offers him little way to meet that state. The film’s central ambiguity—where fantasy ends and madness begins—therefore becomes a problem on set as well as within the story. He cannot tell whether Norma Jeane is failing to act in an ordinary, communicative way or acting so continuously that the role has swallowed the boundary between performance and person.

Repetition, Reception, and Recognition

Widmark’s irritation becomes especially sharp over the repeated takes. Norma Jeane asks to try again because she believes she can do better, even when the director considers a scene successful. The second take improves, the third improves again, and the process continues. Widmark sees the effort as excessive for a melodrama he does not respect; from her perspective, the request is part of the struggle to make the work precise. His impatience sets his professional economy against her conviction that a scene is not finished merely because it has been completed once.

The disagreement does not prevent the filmed result from changing his estimate of her. Widmark later recalls that Monroe took every scene they shared. At first, he had not recognized the extent of it; the daily footage, and still more the previews, made the imbalance plain. When Nell is absent, he feels the film loses life. He resents the role’s passivity and verbosity, while the scenes he considers most vivid—the dangerous episodes involving the child—belong to her. His later complaint thus carries an unintended acknowledgment: the co-star he had expected to dominate becomes the film’s most compelling presence.

That recognition does not make him warmly sympathetic. He is described as sexually attracted to Norma Jeane and increasingly unable to tolerate the strain of working with her. His mixed response—desire, resentment, and reluctant admiration—keeps him from serving as a simple champion of her talent. He registers both the discomfort her intensity creates for other performers and the undeniable effect it has on the screen.

Narrative Role

Widmark’s part in the novel is brief but structurally important. His earlier meeting with Norma Jeane at Schwab’s supplies a small, concrete link between her aspiration and her eventual work; the film then tests the promise of that encounter under professional pressure. His expectations about a technically manageable production are reversed as the supposedly secondary, unstable babysitter takes possession of the scenes and of the film’s emotional life.

Through Widmark, the novel sets two accounts of acting against one another. One is controlled, responsive to direction, and conscious of the craft’s visible procedures. The other is so completely absorbed in character that it can look like paralysis, eccentricity, or danger to those outside it. Widmark cannot comfortably explain what Norma Jeane is doing, but the finished film’s effect persuades him that something powerful has happened. His reluctant testimony gives the performance an external measure: the actress whom colleagues find difficult to reach is also the presence they cannot displace.