{"id":490117,"date":"2026-05-18T05:10:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T05:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/490117\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T05:10:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T05:10:26","slug":"marilyn-monroe-at-100-what-her-films-reveal-about-the-woman-behind-the-myth-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/490117\/","title":{"rendered":"Marilyn Monroe at 100: What her films reveal about the woman behind the myth \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

If a time capsule devoted to Marilyn Monroe<\/a> contained only her films \u2013 floating free of the celluloid-adjacent industries that have thrived on her image and celebrity \u2013 what true things could be gleaned? Her stardom radiates from the screen, her name graduates to top-billed status, and even the uninitiated might guess that hers was a singular fame, worthy of the meta treatment. \u201cWhat blonde in the kitchen?\u201d a tempted husband is asked in The Seven Year Itch. \u201cWouldn\u2019t you like to know?\u201d he says. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s Marilyn Monroe.\u201d<\/p>\n

If her Hollywood<\/a> performances were somehow the last remaining traces of her existence, with no other speculation or fantasy surviving, anyone cracking open that capsule would still be able to detect a defined persona. In her films, she manifests as a peroxide, hourglass force-of-nature and a Technicolor avatar of desire and hope. She breathes life into caricatures through comic timing, delicate innocence and a yearning for more. She inhabits characters who are aspiring, amenable and sexually available, up to a point; women who are presented as dumb, yet often underestimated; secretaries, burlesque \u201cdarlings\u201d and hat-check girls who breezily expose the hypocrisies of men; singers whose sadnesses underpin their complexity; women who both exhibit and conceal their damage. She exudes a 1950s femininity that was permitted and celebrated, yet also a departure from the established mean. Even when, in the funniest and most enjoyable of her films, she is flanked by gal pals, there is only one Marilyn Monroe, and she is gloriously unapologetic about it.<\/p>\n

These fictitious creatures are not the \u201creal\u201d Monroe, and she is not them, but they are not unrelated, and they tell a story of their own about a very 20th century paradox: the extremely famous woman who is also an enigma.<\/p>\n

Norma Jeane Mortenson was born on June 1st, 1926. Marilyn Monroe arrived 20 years later, when Norma Jeane Dougherty, then in the process of divorcing her first husband, the lesser-mentioned James Dougherty, signed a contract with 20th Century Fox. An alliteration-loving executive chose \u201cMarilyn\u201d because she reminded him of the Broadway musical star Marilyn Miller, while Monroe was her mother\u2019s maiden name. As the man whose surname was Mortensen (misspelt Mortenson on her birth certificate) was not her father, this was as much a chance to be who she had always been as it was a new identity.<\/p>\n

My biography ends here. The problem with writing about Marilyn Monroe to mark her centenary is that everything to be said about her has already been said, and almost all of it has been mediated through an event that took place 64 years ago: her fatal barbiturate overdose at the age of 36. My first pop-culture encounter with her legacy came through the filter of Madonna<\/a>, who pastiched Diamonds Are a Girl\u2019s Best Friend from Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953) in the 1985 music video for Material Girl and spent so much of the decade channelling her platinum curls that in the non-linear timeline of my consumption I couldn\u2019t help thinking, while bingeing Monroe films for the purposes of this article, \u201cOh, Marilyn has very Madonnaesque hair in this one.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Six Month Leave, a 2008 episode of 1960s-set series Mad Men, Joan Holloway lies on the office couch of Roger Sterling, her ex-lover. \u201cThis world destroyed her,\u201d she says, upset by the headlines. \u201cShe was a movie star who had everything and everybody, and she threw it away,\u201d he says. To Roger, Monroe was a \u201cstranger\u201d, but Joan insists people \u201cfelt like they knew her\u201d. It soon becomes obvious that their conversation isn\u2019t really about Monroe, as so many of the riffs on her life aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Monroe has been viewed through the prism of her death for so long that even the most playful of her press shots \u2013 she was an icon of stills photography \u2013 register as this confusing mix of vibrant pleasure and cautionary tale. She is now obscured three ways: by the ghoulish focus on her final hours, by the passage of time and by the fact that even those who felt like they knew her, and perhaps thought they had some entitlement to do so, didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The posthumous use of her image, in everything from Andy Warhol\u2019s silk screen prints to 21st century perfume advertisements, decontextualises her from both the 1950s and her own talent. The lurid documentaries held together by apocryphal stories, the pulpy books that bestow credence on the recycled claims of grifters and the biopics that reframe the meaning of Monroe through contemporary lens often muddy our understanding of her time on Earth.<\/p>\n

\"AndyAndy Warhol’s screen print collection Marilyn Monroe’, 1967, at Andy Warhol’s museum in eastern Slovak town of Medzilaborce in 2008. Photograph: Joe Klamar\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

Might her fictions \u2013 the ones that were promoted as such \u2013 prove as accurate a record as anything else? \u201cThe life of Marilyn Monroe, the golden girl of the movies, ended as it began, in misery and tragedy,\u201d opened her obituary in the New York Times. Eventually, we must get around to examining the \u201cgolden girl of the movies\u201d part of that sentence, or the time when she \u201chad everything and everybody\u201d, to borrow Roger\u2019s sexist language, and actually, as radical as this might seem, watch her films.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Marilyn Monroe \u2014 topless, bloodied and killed by her lovers \u2014 just got exploited againOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

So I pressed play on the 18 I could locate, and though they ranged chronologically from B-movie musical romance (Ladies of the Chorus, 1948) to bleak anti-Western (The Misfits, 1961) via screwball comedies and noir, after a while they rolled into one genre, the Marilyn movie, and I was struck by the consistency of their themes, almost as if the real desperation here was not Monroe\u2019s, but Hollywood\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Cinema\u2019s male gaze, in which the camera seamlessly unifies the \u201clook\u201d of the audience with that of male characters, was epitomised by the singing roles Fox gave her, among them Kay in River of No Return (1954), in which she captivates various saloon bars, and Vicky in There\u2019s No Business Like Show Business (1954), in which she performs to tables of enthralled men in a strategically bejewelled sheer dress. By the time we reach Let\u2019s Make Love (1960), the influence of the Hays Code \u2013 the studios\u2019 self-imposed \u201cmoral\u201d guidelines \u2013 is waning, partly thanks to Monroe. As Amanda, she enters the frame legs first, wraps them around a pole and descends in a lilac cable-knit and black opaques. \u201cMy name is Lolita, and I\u2019m not supposed to play with boys,\u201d she breathily announces, before segueing into My Heart Belongs to Daddy.<\/p>\n

\"MarilynMarilyn Monroe excelled at being a film star <\/p>\n

These films, directed and mostly written by men, are threaded with child-like Marilynisms. \u201cReal diamonds! They must be worth their weight in gold!\u201d Sugar declares in Some Like It Hot (1959). \u201cMr Oxley has been complaining about my punctuation, so I\u2019ve been careful to get here before nine,\u201d says Miss Lois Laurel, described as \u201chalf infant\u201d in Monkey Business (1952). But pity the man who presumes she is naive. \u201cIs it only very late at night that you\u2019re such a lonely person and feel the need to share your light with a pure young woman?\u201d asks Elsie Marina in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). \u201cI can be smart when it\u2019s important,\u201d says Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, having earlier professed to be baffled by the proper placement of a diamond tiara. These lines echo Monroe\u2019s own battles to defeat the tedious yet stubborn tradition of assuming that women who look and sound like her must be passive puppets.<\/p>\n

In her films there is usually a Woman Who Isn\u2019t Marilyn \u2013 a sensible, assured and occasionally judgy character who can\u2019t compete and isn\u2019t going to try. In Love Nest (1951) Connie (June Haver) cheerfully accepts she is jealous of her husband\u2019s old wartime friend, Bobbie, who turns out to be bikini-clad Roberta (Monroe). In Niagara (1953), Polly (Jean Peters) says she cannot emulate Marilyn\u2019s wardrobe because \u201cfor a dress like that you\u2019ve got to start laying plans when you\u2019re about 13\u201d. But the most pleasing Monroe films are two in which she plays opposite women who, if they\u2019re not on the same page, are at least reading the same book: camp-fest Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she forms a dynamic duo with Jane Russell\u2019s wisecracking Dorothy, and the frothy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), in which she is joined by fellow pin-up Betty Grable and husky-voiced Lauren Bacall.<\/p>\n

Better these than Bus Stop (1956), in which Monroe, new adherent to method acting, emotes her socks off in bad make-up but must contend with an unbearably idiotic yet apparently redeemable kidnapper (Don Murray), or River of No Return, in which Robert Mitchum pins her down against her will, only to be interrupted by the advances of a mountain lion.<\/p>\n

\"USUS president John F Kennedy (with his back to the camera) and Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1962. Photograph: Cecil W Stoughton \/ The White House <\/p>\n

In the two that remain the most acclaimed and most often shown, she is \u201cevery inch an actress\u201d, as one trailer of the era phrased it, but they are not really Monroe films. In All About Eve (1950), the still-rising star plays Miss Casswell, a wistful wannabe who covets a drink, a fur coat and a career. She is perfect but it\u2019s a cameo \u2013 she\u2019s there and then she\u2019s gone. In Some Like It Hot, meanwhile, she is recognisably \u201cMarilyn\u201d, veering from bubbly bum-wiggler to melancholy chanteuse, but the plot of Billy Wilder\u2019s farce is driven by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as musicians whose enforced drag opens their eyes to the travails of women. Again, she is brilliant, but her vulnerable, accommodating Sugar is the sweetener on the side.<\/p>\n

That Wilder\u2019s dated, innuendo-dependent The Seven Year Itch is mainly remembered as the film in which Monroe feels the \u201cdelicious\u201d breeze from a subway grate encapsulates how the mythology of Marilyn has overpowered the vehicles in which she starred. The comedy was a box-office hit, and as daring as they could make it. \u201cOoh, here comes another one!\u201d says \u201cThe Girl\u201d, aka Monroe, as the next New York train rushes past. But who has watched this lately? The cultural traction of the windblown dress moment now lies entirely in its publicity stills \u2013 indeed, for all the attention garnered by Monroe\u2019s centenary, it is debatable whether even the photographs are quite as famous as they once were.<\/p>\n

\"MarilynMarilyn Monroe outside her home in 1953.
\nPhotograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt <\/p>\n

This was the golden age of Hollywood. There was no bigger prize than being a movie star. If Monroe\u2019s films were not the central source of her esteem, she would not have fought so hard to work her way up from the pin-up trenches, secure better (and better-paid) roles and be rehired when she was let go during the making of Something\u2019s Got to Give, her final, unfinished project. But not even 20th Century Fox can guarantee immortality. In today\u2019s content-saturated mediascape you have to actively hunt down classic films, including hers.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Marilyn Monroe was never respected. Not in her lifetime. She was consumed\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

After her death Monroe became the blonde nexus of art, consumerism and conspiracy theory, a magnet for the imaginations of the mawkish, voyeuristic and faux-sympathetic, and a template for ambitious women destroyed by the world. It pays to recall, every now and again, that she excelled at being a film star.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, however, the scripts seem infused with retrospective ironies now. \u201cYou\u2019re a gal with a lot of variations,\u201d Jed (Richard Widmark) tells Nell (Monroe) in Don\u2019t Bother to Knock (1952). The troubled babysitter is \u201creal steady one minute, all mixed up the next\u201d, he thinks. Later, we see a glassy-eyed, razor-equipped Nell encircled by onlookers. \u201cWhat do you people want?\u201d demands Jed. \u201cWhat are you staring at?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer, of course, is Marilyn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If a time capsule devoted to Marilyn Monroe contained only her films \u2013 floating free of the celluloid-adjacent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,2215,11146,19,17,7250,99371,2212],"class_list":{"0":"post-490117","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-for-you","11":"tag-hollywood-la","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-madonna","15":"tag-marilyn-monroe","16":"tag-weekendreview"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116593860812954786","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}