Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe: The Actress Inside the Blonde

Billy Wilder, who directed her twice and found her maddening, put the paradox on the record: "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!" He was talking about *Some Like It Hot*. She was thirty-two, had just won a Golden Globe, and was three years from death. The argument over whether Marilyn Monroe could actually act had barely begun.

Norma Jeane

She was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, suffered a breakdown in 1934 and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia; Norma Jeane spent her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage. At sixteen she married a factory worker named James Dougherty to avoid being returned to institutional care.

That is the whole of the origin story, and it is worth stating plainly rather than romantically: a child processed through the Los Angeles County system who married her way out of it at an age when most people are in the eleventh grade.

The Radioplane Factory

In late 1944, working at the Radioplane Company munitions plant, she was photographed by David Conover, who was there on assignment. She moved into pin-up modelling, straightened her naturally curly brown hair and dyed it platinum, and by early 1946 had appeared on thirty-three magazine covers. In August 1946 she signed with 20th Century-Fox and took a new name: Marilyn from the Broadway star Marilyn Miller, Monroe from her mother's maiden name.

1953

The early Fox years produced little. Then, in a single year, three films: *Niagara*, *Gentlemen Prefer Blondes* and *How to Marry a Millionaire*. They made her the most famous woman in America and simultaneously built the cage — the dumb blonde, a persona so commercially efficient that Fox saw no reason to let her out of it.

*The Seven Year Itch* (1955) was among her biggest hits and handed the culture the subway-grate image that has outlived every performance she gave. *Some Like It Hot* (1959) won her the Golden Globe.

The Revolt

What the myth usually omits is that she fought back, in business, and won. In 1954, frustrated by typecasting and by pay well below her value, she founded Marilyn Monroe Productions with the photographer Milton Greene and went to war with 20th Century-Fox. The legal fight lasted a year. She spent 1955 in New York studying method acting at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, whose influence stayed central for the rest of her career. Gloria Steinem, who observed her there in the 1950s, grasped the point: the ambition was serious even when the industry treated it as a punchline.

Marriages

She married the retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio in January 1954; the union lasted nine months and collapsed in the wake of the Seven Year Itch publicity stunt. In June 1956 she married the playwright Arthur Miller. That relationship broke down during the filming of *The Misfits* (1961), which Miller had written for her.

The Case for the Actress

The reassessment began while she was still alive. Her 1956 performance in *Bus Stop* drew a headline judgement from the New York Times: "Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress." Joshua Logan, who directed it, compared her to Charlie Chaplin for her capacity to hold comedy and tragedy in the same gesture. *The Misfits* got mixed notices at the time and has been steadily upgraded since; the Huston scholar Tony Tracy calls her work in it "the most mature interpretation of her career."

The most detailed modern case is Stephanie Zacharek's, writing in TIME in 2022 against the film *Blonde*, which she argued had fixated on Monroe's victimhood and thereby erased "one of the central truths of her being: she was a phenomenally intelligent and gifted actor."

Why Marilyn Is Called a Genius

The word is contested for her more than for almost any other film star, and the contest is the interesting part.

The case rests on comic technique, and it is technical rather than mystical. Zacharek locates it in "those fine-grained tonal shifts that make Marilyn's performances so compelling" — the ability to change register inside a single line. Her example is Sugar Kane in *Some Like It Hot* delivering "I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop," a joke about being a loser that lands as tragicomedy because Monroe times it to be both at once. In *How to Marry a Millionaire* she plays Pola Debevoise blundering into doors without her glasses, then turns "You know, like, cows" into something Zacharek calls "gloriously sly" — broad slapstick and precise wit executed simultaneously. And she could go dark: *Don't Bother to Knock* (1952), as an unstable babysitter, is genuinely unsettling.

Wilder's testimony is the strongest single piece of evidence precisely because he did not enjoy working with her. A director who resented her lateness and her inability to hold lines nonetheless called the result the work of "a real artist." That is a professional's grudging measurement, not a fan's.

The counter-case is serious. She was never nominated for an Academy Award. The Golden Globe for *Some Like It Hot* is the only major acting prize she won. Her range was narrow and she knew it. She was chronically unable to work in the conventional way — unprepared, unpunctual, dependent on Strasberg and on take after take — and the argument that the performances were partly assembled in the cutting room by directors of the calibre of Wilder and Huston has never been fully answered. The fairest verdict is that she possessed a specific and rare instrument, comic timing of the highest order attached to an unusual transparency on camera, and that whether that constitutes genius depends on whether you count a gift its owner could not reliably command.

Legacy

She died on 4 August 1962 of acute barbiturate poisoning; the coroner recorded a probable suicide. She was thirty-six. Her films had grossed $200 million by then — roughly two billion in today's money. The American Film Institute ranks her the sixth-greatest female screen legend of Hollywood's golden age. Sixty years on, the image is so ubiquitous that it obscures the work, which is exactly the problem she spent her career, and her own production company, trying to solve.

Achievements

• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy — 1959
• Golden Globe Awards — 1960
• Notable work: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
• Notable work: The Seven Year Itch
• Notable work: The Prince and the Showgirl
• Notable work: Some Like It Hot
• Worked as film actor, film producer and singer