This week marked the 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, a milestone that feels both absurd and somehow entirely reasonable given her enduring presence in popular culture.
Monroe’s status as an icon is hard-wired into our collective consciousness, so much so that when Joyce Carol Oates wrote a thinly veiled roman à clef based on her life, she entitled it simply Blonde.
The name “Marilyn Monroe” is never used in the novel, yet the inspiration is taken entirely for granted by readers from the very first page.
Her lasting image is intensely physical: the platinum blonde hair, the hourglass figure, and the overt yet superficially innocent sexuality that earned her the nickname “the girl with the horizontal walk” after Niagara.
That indelible status was built through major roles in only 11 films across eight years, from Niagara in 1953 to The Misfits in 1961, with Something’s Got To Give left unfinished at her death.
If a single image defines her, it is the moment in The Seven Year Itch when the skirt of her white dress blows upward as she walks over a subway grate.
Yet Monroe was so much more than that image, and considerably more interesting, having studied method acting at the Actors Studio under Lee and Paula Strasberg.
Her performance as Chérie in Bus Stop in 1956 prompted Bosley Crowther of The New York Times to write: “Get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress.”
Her finest work is widely considered to be her role as singer Sugar Kane in Some Like It Hot, where she ceded not an inch to male co-stars Jack Lemmon or Tony Curtis.
Director, producer and screenwriter Billy Wilder was famously at loggerheads with her on set, yet later conceded: “Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did!”
Writing years later, Truman Capote quoted her acting teacher Constance Collier, who observed: “I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has — this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence — could never surface on the stage.”
Collier continued: “It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it.”
The persona of the “dumb blonde” was hugely wide of the mark, as Monroe possessed a voraciously curious mind despite her patchy formal education.
A determined autodidact, she read Flaubert, Yeats, Joyce, Freud, Lawrence, Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, Whitman and Steinbeck, and quoted Milton and Goethe in interviews and correspondence.
When she married playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, Variety ran the headline “Egghead Weds Hourglass,” ignoring the earnest commitment with which she had studied Hebrew texts to convert to Judaism.
Monroe herself once said of Miller that “he wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde,” a remark that carries the unmistakable ring of truth.
She once wrote to her psychiatrist, “I know I will never be happy but I know I can be gay!”, which is, in some ways, an impossibly sad thing to say.
Despite the many conspiracy theories surrounding her death, she likely took her own life on 4 August 1962 with an overdose of barbiturates at the age of 36.
To remember her primarily for the sadness, the tragedy, and the lurid private life is to do her a genuine disservice as both a woman and an artist.
What was unique was her spirit: insecure and uncertain, but ravenous for knowledge and capable of projecting a delicate tremor of emotion that was utterly unforced, naturally funny, and authentically vulnerable.