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In the heart of London in 1956, a glittering premiere becomes the setting for an imagined collision between two of the century’s most famous women. Julie Owen Moylan’s new novel stages a moment when Hollywood glamour and royal protocol intersect, using that meeting to probe the mechanics of celebrity, the burdens of royal duty, and the fragile boundary between the life shown to the world and the life guarded at home. The book offers a layered view of public personae and private anxieties, showing how image-making and obligation shape choices in ways that ripple through marriage, family and career.
Two women, one city: the setup in London
The narrative places Marilyn Monroe—arriving to film with Laurence Olivier—and a young Elizabeth II in parallel frames: both are visible to the globe, both are constrained by expectations. For Marilyn there is the contrast between her star persona and the woman married to Arthur Miller, while for Elizabeth the struggle is between her role as sovereign and her role as wife and mother. Moylan uses London as a pressure cooker where press attention, cinematic ambition and royal ceremony converge. The novel dramatizes the idea that public visibility can be both a currency and a chain, and it asks whether intimacy can survive when every gesture is already a public story.
Behind the public masks
Moylan gives each figure a distinct inner life so readers understand the costs that fame extracts. In Marilyn’s case the book examines how performance operates as protection: to audiences she is a dazzling emblem of stardom, but privately she contends with past trauma and the strain of being continually observed. The text explores the couple’s awkward honeymoon substitute near Windsor Castle, the intrusive press, and the daily need to ‘switch on’ the Marilyn persona. That tension forces questions about whether a partner, here represented by Arthur Miller, can ever truly see the person beneath the image and still accept the demands of celebrity.
Marilyn on set: acting, method and conflict
The novel foregrounds a clash of artistic approaches—Marilyn’s immersion in method acting and the British theatrical tradition represented by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Moylan treats method acting as a working definition of bringing private feeling into performance, and she shows how that practice can both intensify a role and reopen old wounds. Scenes on set reveal how bullying and professional friction trigger psychological responses—stammering, silence, or a sudden social mask. The book uses these moments to interrogate the cost of emotional realism when the world is always watching and when intimacy with a partner requires emotional availability the star cannot always afford.
Elizabeth and the crown: duty within family life
In parallel, Moylan examines how being monarch reshapes domestic choices. The novel depicts Elizabeth using a protective public expression—referred to in the text as the Queen Face—to manage difficult private conversations and to preserve the institution above all else. Conflicts over Princess Margaret’s romantic life and Prince Philip’s unsettled role create scenes where sovereign responsibility collides with sisterhood and marriage. The narrative asks whether a sovereign can show the vulnerability a partner needs while still maintaining the steady, constancy that the public expects from a monarch.
Julie Owen Moylan brings extensive research and a novelist’s empathy to this imagined encounter. She is the author of three novels—That Green Eyed Girl, 73 Dove Street and Circus of Mirrors—with her debut earning recognition as a Waterstones’ Welsh Book of the Month and becoming official runner up for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize. Her work has been shortlisted at the Fingerprint Awards and featured at the Hay Festival as one of the TEN AT TEN debuts. 73 Dove Street was named a Waterstones’ Book of the Year and Daily Mail Historical Fiction Book of the Year, and its paperback was a Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month in 2026. Moylan’s shorter pieces have appeared in publications such as the Sunday Express, The Independent, New Welsh Review and Good Housekeeping. Elizabeth and Marilyn will be released in April 2026, offering readers a carefully imagined portrait of two lives that seem larger than biography yet remain painfully human.