Marilyn Monroe & Mental Illness: Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)
A film unjustly lampooned by the critics, Don’t Bother to Knock, was shaped by Marilyn Monroe’s struggles with mental illness and her drive to be known for more than just her beauty.
Hollywood is full of wrecked souls and broken dreams and the immortality made from some of them. The pressures of stardom and being in the public eye at the intensity of a sunburst have indeed weighed hard on many a Hollywood and music luminary, with the end result often being a nasty drug and/or alcohol addiction or even worse.
In the motion picture realm, we have seen Robin Williams, who hung himself with his belt in 2014, arguably after he found out he had a form of dementia. Heath Ledger, who died in 2008 of a drug overdose: some say his state of mind was made much worse by his extreme method of acting and perhaps at least partial descent into psychosis in his genre-rocking and bone-chilling portrayal of The Joker in the second installment of Christopher Nolan’s darkly noir take on the Batman saga, The Dark Knight — although Ledger’s sister says this about The Joker killing him is not accurate.
These two are just notable cases among many others, like the director of Top Gun (1986), Tony…
