Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe (/ˈmærəlɪn mənˈroʊ/ MARR-ə-lin mən-ROH; born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2024) by her death in 1962.

Born in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage before marrying James Dougherty at the age of 16. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a photographer from the First Motion Picture Unit and began a successful pin-up modeling career, which led to short-lived film contracts with 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. After roles as a freelancer, she began a longer contract with Fox in 1951, becoming a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including As Young as You Feel and Monkey Business, and in the dramas Clash by Night and Don't Bother to Knock. Monroe faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photographs prior to fame, but the story resulted in increased interest in her films.

Monroe became one of the most marketable Hollywood stars in 1953. She had leading roles in the film noir Niagara, which overtly relied on her sex appeal, and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, which established her star image as a "dumb blonde". The same year, her nude images were used as the centerfold and cover of the first issue of Playboy. Monroe played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image, but felt disappointed when typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project but returned to star in The Seven Year Itch (1955), one of the biggest box office successes of her career.

When the studio was still reluctant to change Monroe's contract, she founded her own film production company in 1954 with her friend Milton Greene. She dedicated 1955 to building the company and began studying method acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Later that year, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Her subsequent roles included a critically acclaimed performance in Bus Stop (1956) and her first independent production in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), for which she received a BAFTA nomination. She won a Golden Globe for her role in Some Like It Hot (1959), a critical and commercial success. Her last completed film was the drama The Misfits (1961).

Monroe's troubled private life received much attention. Her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller were highly publicized; both ended in divorce. On August 4, 1962, Monroe died at age 36 of an overdose of barbiturates at her Los Angeles home. Her death was ruled a probable suicide. Monroe remains a pop culture icon, with the American Film Institute ranking her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson at Los Angeles General Hospital on June 1, 1926. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker (née Monroe), was born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, into a poor Midwestern family who migrated to California at the turn of the century. At the age of 14, Gladys had married John Newton Baker, an abusive man nine years her senior. They had two children together, Robert and Berniece. Gladys successfully filed for divorce and sole custody of her two oldest in 1923, but Baker kidnapped the children soon after and moved with them to his native Kentucky. Monroe first learnt about her sister when she was 12 years old, and met her for the first time in her late teens.

Following the divorce, Gladys worked as a film negative cutter at Consolidated Film Industries. In 1924, she married Martin Edward Mortensen, but the union lasted only a few months, although they did not legally divorce until four years later. Gladys named Mortensen (misspelled Mortenson) as Monroe's father in the birth certificate, but most of Monroe's biographers agree that this was unlikely as their separation had taken place well before she became pregnant. According to biographers Fred Guiles and Lois Banner, her father was likely Charles Stanley Gifford, Gladys's superior at RKO Studios, with whom she had an affair in 1925. This was supported by a comparison conducted in 2022 between Monroe's DNA and that of one of Gifford's descendants.

Although Gladys was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, Monroe's early childhood was stable and happy. Gladys placed her daughter with evangelical Christian foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in the suburban town of Hawthorne. She also lived there for six months until she was forced to move back to the city for employment. She then began visiting her daughter on weekends. In the summer of 1933, Gladys bought a small house in Hollywood with a loan from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and moved seven-year-old Monroe in with her. They shared the house with lodgers, actors George and Maude Atkinson and their daughter, Nellie. In January 1934, Gladys had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After several months in a rest home, she was committed to the Metropolitan State Hospital. She spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals and was rarely in contact with Monroe. Monroe became a ward of the state, and her mother's friend Grace Goddard took responsibility over her and her mother's affairs.

For the next 16 months, Monroe continued living with the Atkinsons and may have been sexually abused during this time. Always a shy girl, she developed a stutter and became withdrawn. In the summer of 1935, she briefly stayed with Grace and her husband Erwin "Doc" Goddard and two other families. In September 1935, Grace placed her in the Los Angeles Orphans Home #2, Hollygrove. The orphanage was "a model institution" and was described in positive terms by her peers, but Monroe felt abandoned. Encouraged by the orphanage staff, who thought that Monroe would be happier living in a family, Grace became her legal guardian in 1936 but did not take her out of the orphanage until the summer of 1937. Monroe's second stay with the Goddards lasted only a few months because Doc allegedly molested her. She then lived for brief periods with her relatives and Grace's friends and relatives in Los Angeles and Compton.

Monroe's childhood experiences first made her want to become an actress:

Monroe found a more permanent home in September 1938, when she began living with Grace's aunt Ana Lower in Sawtelle. Monroe was enrolled at Emerson Junior High School and went to weekly Christian Science services with Lower. She excelled in writing and contributed to the school newspaper, but was otherwise a mediocre student. Owing to the elderly Lower's health problems, Monroe returned to live with the Goddards in Van Nuys in about early 1941. That same year, she began attending Van Nuys High School.

In 1942, the company that employed Doc relocated him to West Virginia. California child protection laws prevented the Goddards from taking Monroe out of state, and she faced having to return to the orphanage. To avoid this, it was decided that she leave high school and marry their neighbor, factory worker James Dougherty, who was five years her senior. The marriage took place just after her 16th birthday on June 19, 1942. Monroe found herself and Dougherty mismatched, and later said she was "dying of boredom" during the marriage. In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was stationed on Santa Catalina Island, where Monroe moved with him.

In April 1944, Dougherty was shipped out to the Pacific, where he remained for most of the next two years. After Dougherty left, Monroe moved in with Dougherty's parents and began a job at the Radioplane Company, a munitions factory in Van Nuys, to help the war effort. In late 1944, she met photographer David Conover, then working in the U.S. Army Air Forces' First Motion Picture Unit, who had been sent to the factory to shoot morale-boosting pictures of female workers. Although none of her pictures were used, she quit working at the factory in January 1945 and began modeling for Conover and his friends. Defying her deployed husband and his disapproving mother, she moved on her own and signed a contract with the Blue Book Model Agency in August 1945.

The agency deemed Monroe's figure more suitable for pin-up than high fashion modeling, and she was featured mostly in advertisements and men's magazines. She straightened her naturally curly brown hair and dyed it platinum blonde. According to Emmeline Snively, the agency's owner, Monroe quickly became one of its most ambitious and hard-working models; by early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek. As a model, Monroe occasionally used the pseudonym Jean Norman.

Through Snively, Monroe signed a contract with an acting agency in June 1946. After an unsuccessful interview at Paramount Pictures, she was given a screen-test by Ben Lyon, a 20th Century-Fox executive. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, but he gave her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe's contract began in August 1946, and she and Lyon selected the stage name "Marilyn Monroe". The first name was picked by Lyon, who was reminded of Broadway star Marilyn Miller; the surname was Monroe's mother's maiden name. In September 1946, she divorced Dougherty, who had been opposed to her career.

Monroe spent her first six months at Fox learning acting, singing, and dancing, and observing the film-making process. Her contract was renewed in February 1947, and she was given her first film roles, bit parts in Dangerous Years (1947) and Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948). The studio also enrolled her in the Actors' Laboratory Theatre, an acting school teaching the techniques of the Group Theatre; she later stated that it was "my first taste of what real acting in a real drama could be, and I was hooked". Despite her enthusiasm, her teachers thought her too shy and insecure to have a future in acting, and Fox did not renew her contract in August 1947. She returned to modeling while also doing occasional odd jobs at film studios, such as working as a dancing "pacer" behind the scenes to keep the leads on point at musical sets.