Rachael Le Roque as Marilyn Monroe promotes launch of new film at City Screen (From York Press)

Rachael Le Roque as Marilyn Monroe promotes launch of new film at City Screen

11:43am Friday 25th November 2011 in Film reviews By Charles Hutchinson

NEVER mind spending one week with Marilyn, Rachael Le Roque lives her whole life with her…and she’s going out with Elvis.

You may remember her as Rachael Mills, the chameleon Pop Artist who popped up at York galleries, lingerie shops and pubs in 2007 to 2008 with her kitsch acrylic portraits of Madonna, Kylie and Marilyn, changing her own retro poster-girl look for each show.

Now she is a living piece of art herself, the name Marilyn inked on her left wrist, hair bottle-blonde, eye make-up pale white, pout all rouge agogo and cleavage saying hello boys.

Rachael has recreated herself as a Marilyn doppelganger, available for diamond displays, birthday and retirement parties, corporate events, a Marilyn art exhibition in Boston Spa …and today’s launch of Simon Curtis’s film My Week With Marilyn at City Screen, where she will make personal appearances in the Riverside bar before the 5.45pm and 8.55pm screenings.

“Look at me, I’ve transformed myself,” she says, her accent from Sunderland, her looks from the Monroe picture gallery, as she attracts glances from the bar’s customers on Tuesday afternoon. “I’d been in the darkest time of my life, splitting up with my fiance, in May last year, and I was at rock bottom.

“I’d gone back to my Sunderland roots, back to my homeland, and I was looking after my nana [her great grandmother], who had dementia and didn’t always know who I was. ‘She’d call me that lass with the white hair’…”

That lass with the white hair and the Monroe film collection was already doing the “odd bit of pin-up modelling”, and drawing positive energy from Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret, when her world took a sudden turn for the better.

“Somehow, out of all that, a musician friend of mine, who saw some of my pin-up photos and thought I had a resemblance of Marilyn, just happened to have a song coming out called Marilyn Monroe (Wam Bam JFK).”

The group in question were The Wolfmen, a London line-up featuring featuring singer Chris Constantinou and Adam Ant guitarist Marco Pirroni.

“I ended up being contacted by Chris to appear in the video and filmed my segment in York with some arty friends of mine filming me, then I’d send it off to the Wolfmen and go back to care for my nana,” says Rachael. “How did happen? I’ve gone from painting pop art to now being the art myself. Weird, isn’t it?!”

Her great grandmother passed away last September, whereupon she went down to London to live with her uncle. “While I was there, The Wolfmen held the premiere of the video in Soho and In saw myself on the big screen for the first time,” she says.

“I didn’t know what to expect, whether I was any good or not, but then I got other people’s reactions and they were saying, ‘you really look like her, you should do it for a living’.”

Rachael has since signed up with agencies and divides her time between York – where her mother works in the lighting department at Barnitts – and Scotland, where Marilyn has been spotted with Elvis, loved up in the Highlands.

“My partner is an Elvis impersonator,” she explains, pulling out a picture of John Graceland Burnett, who has the unexpected email address of John_highlandpiper@hotmail.co.uk.

“He also plays the bagpipes. Can you believe that? Elvis playing bagpipes, though he doesn’t do it in a jump suit, of course!”

As well as making an exhibition of herself at 26, Rachel continues to paint in the Sixties’ Pop Art mode, these days concentrating on private commissions rather than doing shows. “Madonna is my biggest seller, but closely followed by Marilyn,” she says.

Qualified as a make-up artist too in the last couple of years (“that helps!”, she says), Rachael does not always dress as Marilyn. “When I’m just me, because I’m quite punky people think I’m Debbie Harry or Madonna, but Marilyn does go with me everywhere now, I have to say,” she says.

“I’m getting used to being looked at, though I haven’t got used to what men shout out or the wolf whistles. I do feel quite vulnerable as Marilyn..I can identify with her demons, having been in a dark place myself, but transforming into Marilyn is definitely the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

• Rachael’s favourite Marilyn Monroe film is 1955’s The Seven Year Itch.

And what does she reckon to The Prince And The Showgirl, the 1957 film that forms the focus of My Week With Marilyn? “I don’t think it’s the best movie she ever did but she does outshine Laurence Olivier,” she says