A monologue from the screenplay by Patty Jenkins
EILEEN
I always wanted to be in the movies. When I was little, I thought for sure that one day I was gonna be a big, big star.
Or maybe just beautiful. Beautiful and rich. Like the women on TV.
Yeah, I had a lot of dreams. And I guess you could call me a real romantic ’cause I truly believed that one day, they’d come true.
So I dreamed about it for hours. (pause) As the years went by, I learned to stop sharing this with people.
They said I was dreaming, but back then, I believed it wholeheartedly.
So whenever I was down, I would just escape into my mind, to my other life, where I was someone else.
It made me happy to think that all these people just didn’t know yet who I was going to be. But one day, they’d all see.
I heard that Marilyn Monroe was discovered in a soda shop and I thought for sure it could be like that.
So I started going out real young and I was always secretly looking for who was going to discover me. Was it this guy?
Or maybe this one. I never knew. But even if they couldn’t take me all the way, like Marilyn, they would somehow believe in me just enough.
They would see me for what I could be and think I was beautiful. Like a diamond in the rough.
They would take me away to my new life… and my new world… where everything would be different.
Yeah. I lived that way for a long, long time. In my head, dreaming like that. It was nice. (Pause) And one day, it just stopped.