Marilyn Monroe

From Some Like It Hot to The Misfits (and with a Millionaire in between), here's a look at Marilyn Monroe's accomplished onscreen legacy.

The performances in this countdown showcase her unforgettable work as a dynamic leading lady. While some consider Monroe to be synonymous with a life of scandal, and others see her simply as a bubble-headed sex symbol, this list forcefully counters those misconceptions. As an actor, Marilyn Monroe embodied glamour, tragedy, romanticism, and wit.

Netflix's Blonde is a dreamy, difficult film. It's not for everyone, but Ana de Armas' performance as Marilyn Monroe certainly is.

pricing, plans, channels, and how to get it](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/how-does-hulu-work/) [Ana de Armas shines as Marilyn Monroe in new Blonde trailer](https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-blonde-trailer/) It’s a specific kind of heartbreak, realizing only too late that you have yet to find someone willing to put in as much effort for you as you would for them. Instead, it’s the quietest scenes that end up leaving the biggest marks, like one that comes late in the film and follows de Armas as she desperately searches her house for a tip only to find her delivery boy long gone by the time she’s returned to give it to him. It should go without saying which of those aspects of Blonde’s Marilyn prove to be more compelling, but the film’s occasionally uneven handling of her legacy doesn’t stop its ideas about celebrity — both the costs and requirements of it — from ringing loud and clear. Part of that has to do with de Armas’ real-life Cuban accent, which never fades even in the moments when the actress herself is leaning all the way into Monroe’s breathy way of speaking. In order to communicate her inner longing and loneliness, Dominik also has de Armas’ Monroe constantly refer to every man in her life as “daddy,” which is a decision that could have been tolerable had it been used a bit more sparingly. As a matter of fact, Dominik still tells a moving story of loneliness, regret, and emotional yearning with Blonde, a film that feels less like an outlandish Hollywood dream and more like a nightmarish descent into a dark void. The film also features a handful of terribly on-the-nose music cues, including the time when “Bye Bye Baby” begins to play just seconds after de Armas’ Monroe has been coerced into having an abortion that she didn’t want. But there are also moments in which Blonde feels like the most generous fictional depiction of Monroe to date, one that wants almost nothing more than to honor her not just as a movie star for the ages, but as a brave and capable artist. There are moments when Dominik, unfortunately, seems to be further playing into the over-sexualization and infantilization of Monroe that has run rampant for decades, and which attempts to render her as nothing more than a naïve sexpot without any agency of her own. At the center of Blonde’s many surreal images and nightmarish sequences, though, is Ana de Armas, whose performance as Marilyn Monroe feels perfectly calibrated for the film she’s in. In the case of Blonde, we’re shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

Andrew Dominik's 'Blonde' has generated plenty of controversy for its depiction of violence towards Marilyn Monroe. But could the icon's complicated story ...

Near the end of Blonde, a drugged and drunken Marilyn collapses on the floor of a plane flying her to give the President of the United States a blow job, keening and rolling on the ground. But perhaps what we mean by it’s so sad is that we see in women like Blonde’s Marilyn the futility of living so close to life’s marrow, so perpetually in tune with the deep down thrum. And while our feelings about Marilyn Monroe still run hot decades after her death, this fascination may be in part due to our uneasy relationship with the display of female pain among the living. Our enduring fascination with Marilyn points to something darker in the ether; something darker in ourselves. We see this in Blonde when Marilyn, awash in bouquets and fan letters, is being zipped into her undergarments by attendants while confessing that she feels like “a slave to Marilyn Monroe” and is exhausted by life as a caricature. “Every one of us, everybody in the world, would give their right arm to be you.” Only the visible is allowed to be real for a beautiful movie star. This first manifestation of her grief — to make herself beautiful, to make herself sexy — was the most socially acceptable one she could have chosen. The story of beauty is hagiography, while the story of glamour is riveting. When Marilyn slipped into a tight sweater, glued false lashes onto her eyelids, and parlayed the stammer she’d developed after being molested as an 8-year-old into a breathy aural suggestion of sex, she was looking for a daddy, as she would call all of her future lovers: a father figure who would never abandon her as her own father had. She was the aestheticization of female pain embodied, and this is central to [our enduring fascination with her](https://www.thecut.com/2022/09/leave-marilyn-monroe-alone.html) almost 60 years after her death. To use it as fuel to become what the world wanted from a woman — a pliant pinup willing to smile, at least for a little while, in obscenity’s face. Marilyn was about something that had already begun to fall out of favor in the mid-20th century and has continued declining in popularity ever since, which is the idea of a woman needing a man to love her.

As one of Hollywood's sex symbols, it's not difficult to imagine the horrors and trauma that Norma Jeane Mortenson might have faced as an actor finding her way ...

Considering that Marilyn Monroe is one of the most celebrated and beloved actresses of her time, there is never a single moment in this movie (that follows her through the height of her career) when she feels triumphant. As a woman watching this and as a lover of Marilyn Monroe, this felt like torture. None of the people in her life — except for maybe her makeup artist Whitey, aka Allan Snyder (Toby Huss) — is there to comfort her or help her or love her. Men want to possess her or fix her or hurt her, women want to hate her and shame her. De Armas is a duplicate of Monroe in some scenes, with it nearly being impossible to tell the difference between her and the real Monroe. She's crying for the entire movie, and you want to cry with her for the way they're butchering Monroe's legacy. Monroe is perpetually surrounded by men; the only women in her life abandon her or make fun of her. However, it is marketed as a historical film, and it's not really emphasized to its audience that it's based on a fictional story about Monroe by Joyce Carol Oates. The fact that those moments feel so genuine makes it even more painful that the movie doesn't linger in them and instead chooses to shock and sensationalize. Chayze Irvin's camera work is often dreamlike and the constantly shifting perspectives, aspect ratios, and jumping between black and white and color adds to the chaotic nature of the story. If you ever wanted a lesson in what the male gaze looks like, this movie is the prime example. [Blonde](https://collider.com/tag/blonde/) portrays [Marilyn Monroe](https://collider.com/tag/marilyn-monroe/) as a lifelong victim.

She was an actress of uncommon talent. But once again a director is more interested in examining her body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her ...

Monroe’s life was tough, but there was more to it than Dominik grasps, the proof of which is in the films she left behind — “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Misfits” — the whole damn filmography. But by so insistently erasing the divide between these realms, Dominik ends up reducing Marilyn to the very image — the goddess, the sexpot, the pinup, the commodity — that he also seems to be trying to critique. Dominik does get around to showing her face, which is beaming as the camera points up toward Marilyn in outward supplication. The movie opens with a short black-and-white sequence that re-creates the night Monroe filmed the most famous scene in Billy Wilder’s garish 1955 comedy, “The Seven Year Itch,” about a married man lusting after a neighbor played by Monroe. In the introduction to the book, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A woman, Showalter later adds without much conviction, “who was much more than a victim.” His Norma Jeane — and her glamorous, vexed creation, Marilyn Monroe — is almost nothing more than a victim: As the years passed and even as her fame grows, she is mistreated again and again, even by those who claim to love her. Watching “Blonde,” I wondered if Dominik had ever actually watched a Marilyn Monroe film, had seen the transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace? But of course this is all about Monroe, one of the most famous women of the 20th century, and it revisits her fame and life — Bobby Cannavale plays a character based on Joe DiMaggio, and Adrien Brody on Arthur Miller — with enough fidelity to suggest that Dominik is working in good faith when he’s simply exploiting her anew. “Blonde” doesn’t announce itself as fiction right off, though it carries the usual mealy-mouthed disclaimer in the credits. (As Anthony Summers points out in his book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” [she formed her own corporation: Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.) Mostly, what’s missing is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius. After a brief prelude that introduces Marilyn at the height of her fame, the movie rewinds to the sad, lonely little girl named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson).

With Ana de Armas playing Marilyn Monroe in 'Blonde' hitting Netflix today, we're ranking every actress who has played the star onscreen from Michelle ...

The movie is based on the memoir by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young third AD on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, the less iconic comedy starring Sir Laurence Olivier as the eponymous prince who falls in love with Monroe’s showgirl. Here, Monroe is covered up (literally) and spoken over (literally) because the story is never really about her; it’s about the boys obsessed with her as the ultimate goal. Much importance is given to the push-and-pull relationship between Marilyn and her mother, Gladys (Susan Sarandon) — far more than her marriages or affair with JFK, which sets this biopic apart from the others. In a remote castle populated by celebrity impersonators, Marilyn lives with her husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), and their daughter, Shirley Temple (Esmé Creed-Miles). The entire premise of the short-lived Smash is the impossibility of a single performer fully capturing that indescribable thing that made Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe. The resulting film (which garnered a sequel, Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn) is much more about men staring at the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson than about the person herself. Monroe’s purported affair with the Kennedys is the least interesting thing about her (and them). Positioned as her one true love, the one who got away, and even a secret fourth husband, this is possibly the most offensive entry in the “mediocre man somehow charms Monroe” subgenre. In a series criticized for taking liberties with historical facts, it’s not surprising there is little respect paid to the memory of Monroe (she has to mock-blow Bobby Kennedy), who’s presented here as little more than a crass, unstable bimbo. Barbara Niven (a Lifetime-movie staple) plays a cartoon version of Monroe: boobs out, big blonde wig, and desperate to get in bed with JFK. A lot of these are told from the point of view of the men who took advantage of her or pined for her from afar, so much so that there’s a whole genre of “Marilyn and me” stories that lean heavily toward the “and me” part. That’s not counting the myriad of cameos (she pops up in the background of a “supposedly dead celebrity” party of immortals in Death Becomes Her), allusions (Penélope Cruz in Broken Embraces dons a Marilyn-esque wig) and stories loosely inspired by her story (the Paddy Chayefsky-penned 1958 film The Goddess is widely assumed to be based on Monroe).

"Blonde" Makeup and hair crew on how they transformed Ana de Armas into Marilyn Monroe.

“The gray is painted into their hair to make them more distinguished.” She adds, “There are silvery streaks painted in, and when you look at the original, you think, ‘Why would they do that?’ So we had to copy that.” In recreating “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Kerwin mixed a fuchsia lip with red. Says Kerwin, “We needed something sturdy that could hold up with the gluing and ungluing of wigs.” “It changed the eye shape,” Kerwin explains. It gave us a chance to figure out what worked better in black and white as opposed to color,” explains Kerwin. The shoot session was done before principal filming began, and it helped immensely since they would have to recreate many of Monroe’s most iconic moments.

Filmmaker Andrew Dominik has called Blonde “a movie for all the unloved children of the world.” Here's the real story of Monroe's family life.

I did this at sixteen by getting married.” (Monroe’s only guardian in the film is a neighbor who appears briefly, played by Sara Paxton.) When McKee Goddard and her husband [announced their move](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/leaming-marilyn.html?scp=62&sq=orphan%2520train&st=cse) to West Virginia they offered a then 15-year-old Monroe the choice between marrying James Dougherty, the 21-year-old son of a former neighbor, or returning to the orphanage. [spent her childhood](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/marilyn-monroe-career-timeline/62/) in various orphanages and foster homes, where she allegedly faced [sexual abuse](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/11/marilyn-monroe-201011) and emotional distress. When her daughter was three years old, Gladys would [allegedly](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Secret_Life_of_Marilyn_Monroe/MlkKQf4Mt00C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Ida) make a thwarted attempt to break into Monroe’s foster home, placing her daughter in a duffel bag and briefly locking out the foster mother. “I used to tell lies in my interviews—chiefly about my mother and father,” Monroe wrote in My Story. [two weeks old](https://www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-mother-relationship) when Gladys first dropped her off at a foster home in Hawthorne, California. As the mother of two children—Jackie and Berniece—who had already been taken from her by an ex-husband, Gladys was eager to keep her youngest in her life in some form, according to [Biography](https://www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-mother-relationship). [RKO film cutter](https://time.com/6215916/blonde-true-story-marilyn-monroe-netflix/)). Based on the [2000 Pulitzer Prize–shortlisted novel](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/04/back-to-blonde) by Joyce Carol Oates, he has [called](https://collider.com/blonde-ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-andrew-dominik-comments/) Blonde “a movie for all the unloved children of the world.” She is shown directly threatening her daughter’s life multiple times— nearly drowning her in a bathtub and driving her toward the 1933 Griffith Park fire. “It wasn’t till later that I realized how much she had done for me,” Monroe wrote of her “Aunt Grace” in her posthumously published memoir, [My Story](https://www.google.com/books/edition/My_Story/VbOIqnTRumIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=arranged). “Every baby needs a da-da-daddy,” Marilyn Monroe sings in one of her first credited roles, as former burlesque dancer Peggy Martin in 1948’s Ladies of the Chorus. At the film’s beginning, a seven-year-old Norma Jeane Baker (Lily Fisher) is tormented by her alcoholic and mentally unstable mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson).

Did Monroe have an affair with JFK? Was she abused by Joe DiMaggio? Was she in a throuple?

But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that,” Roberts recalled. What seems highly dubious is that Monroe would let Kennedy treat her as dismissively as is suggested by Blonde, even though the womanizing president was notoriously not a romantic when it came to his conquests. Z,” a meeting that might be her big break if it results in a contract with “the studio.” Instead of an audition, she finds she is expected to perform fellatio on him. After treating her with as much respect and affection as he would a sex doll with no needs or personality of her own, he turns his back and the agents hustle her out—all wham, bam, with not even a thank you, ma’am. Baker had a mental breakdown in January 1934 and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, after which she was in and out of institutions for the rest of her life. Blonde depicts (in gory detail) Marilyn having an abortion after her breakup with the two Juniors, although whether this was her decision and arose, as the film suggests, out of her fear that her mother’s mental instability could be hereditary or whether the studio arranged it so she could start shooting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on schedule is left ambiguous. “ [An actress isn’t a machine](https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a28305/marilyn-monroe-career-woman/#:~:text=An%20actress%20isn%27t%20a%20machine%2C%20but%20they%20treat%20you,contract%20with%20Twentieth%20Century%20Fox.),” she told Life magazine, “but they treat you like one.” After Gentlemen Prefer Blondes proved to be Fox’s highest-earning film to date, Monroe expected to be able to command roles that showed off her range as an actress. The result was an estrangement between us, and I have not seen her for several years.” [By some accounts](https://people.com/movies/marilyn-monroes-most-famous-lovers-truth-vs-rumor/), it was not Monroe’s stepping out with movie stars for publicity that broke up the relationship, but Chaplin discovering her in bed with his brother Sydney. DiMaggio, 12 years older than Monroe, tried to control her career, discouraging her from taking roles that reinforced the sexualized blond-bombshell image she was best known for and encouraging her to become a full-time housewife. [Blonde](https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/blonde-marilyn-monroe-netflix-movie-ana-de-armas.html) is not so much a biopic based on the facts of the late Hollywood icon’s life as a speculative dive into her psyche, very much in the vein of [Spencer](https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/spencer-kristen-stewart-princess-diana-movie-accuracy.html), Pablo Larraín’s tribute to another iconic blond, Princess Diana. Gladys’ behavior grows increasingly erratic, including putting Norma Jeane in a car and driving toward a wildfire dressed only in a nightgown, until finally she tries to drown the child in the bathtub, after which she is committed to a state institution for the hospitalization of the mentally ill. was the same age as I, 21, an attractive, petite, unknown movie actress named Norma Jean Dougherty who was under contract at Twentieth Century-Fox.” However, Chaplin went on to recall, “from a professional point of view it was absolutely necessary for her to be seen together with all kinds of movie stars to get the papers interested in giving her a mention.

From her fight for pay parity on 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' to troubles on the set of 'Some Like It Hot.'

[her final interview](https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/14/greatinterviews), Monroe would recount a similar story: “I remember when I got the part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. One of Blonde’s only moments of levity comes when Monroe is offered $500 a week to star in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while her costar Jane Russell is paid $100,000 because she’s on loan from another studio. That contract was [reportedly](https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/inside-marilyn-monroes-twisted-toxic-relationships/) not extended after Monroe allegedly refused sex with studio president Harry Cohn in his office. At the start of her career in show-biz, Blonde’s Monroe is raped by a man referred to as “Mr. Later in the film, when Monroe is asked by Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) how she got her start in movies, she appears disturbed and flashbacks of the assault play in her head. [per](https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/inside-marilyn-monroes-twisted-toxic-relationships/) biographer Charles Casillo, she had an arrangement with film executive Joe Schenck, in which she would “service” him for career advancement, including a six-month deal with Columbia Pictures. He gave me a script to read and told me how to pose while reading it. “He had a bug up his ass about not absolutely giving her the right parts. But how many of the show-biz stories in Dominik’s Blonde are true to how they really went down? She was not respected within the industry. Below, a breakdown of the filmmaking fact vs. Viewers are offered snippets of Monroe’s career—her first major performance as a deranged babysitter in 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock, her fight for pay parity ahead of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and turbulent days on 1959’s Some Like It Hot.

Netflix's Blonde has renewed interest in the actress' short but memorable life. The actress appeared in Gentelmen Prefer Blondes and other classic movies.

Found on a table in her home was a letter from the creator of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, who wanted her for the lead in a new musical. Her psychiatrist called the doctor who actually prescribed Monroe the sleeping pills, who then came and pronounced Monroe dead when he arrived. She then married playwright Arthur Miller (best known for "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible"), but she divorced him in 1961. In 2000, Joyce Carol Oates published a fictionalized version of Monroe's life in Blonde, which Netflix adapted into a feature film of the same name starring Ana de Armas. For model and actress Marilyn Monroe—the subject of a new fictionalized move on her life, Blonde—her personal life pervaded through her professional career. Monroe's mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and financial hardship and her father was out of the picture, so she shuffled between foster homes and guardians until she married a 21-year-old named Jim Dougherty at age 16.

The life of Marilyn Monroe is one of Hollywood's most enduring, intriguing and ultimately tragic stories, and it serves as the basis for Netflix's film ...

Illustrated with rare photos of Marilyn throughout her life, My Story tells the real story of how Marilyn became the American Hollywood icon the world knows and loves today. [National Suicide Prevention Lifeline](https://988lifeline.org/) at [988](tel:18002738255) or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. She said life wasn’t worth living anymore.” Love letters and phone calls to the president were going unanswered and her affairs with both Jack and Bobby were considered a liability for the Whitehouse and both men distanced themselves from Monroe–rejection and loneliness hit her hard. Written in her own words, My Story takes readers through Marilyn’s life, from her childhood as an unwanted orphan to her rise as a movie star and sex symbol. For the next 20 years, he had six roses delivered to Monroe’s crypt in the Corridor of Memories three times a week. Monroe believed it was to help her withdraw from alcohol and sleeping pills, but she quickly learned it was because she was deemed “self-destructive” and placed in a straitjacket to sit in a maximum-security ward. Lawford told detectives that he later regretted not checking in on her later in the evening. “She talked about being a waif, that she was ugly, that people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She contacted her ex-husband, baseball god John DiMaggio, who got Monroe moved to another hospital where she was treated as a regular patient and her detox from alcohol and drugs could begin. She was one of the world’s first true “sex symbols”, becoming an icon for a time of sexual revolution between the 1950s and 60s. At 3.50 am, Monroe’s doctor arrived and pronounced her dead at the scene. Ralph Greenson, who broke into Monroe’s bedroom through the window and found the star unresponsive in her bed.

The artist, who died at age 36, had an intelligence that surprised many, but was always perceived superficially and ended up succumbing to her character.

The second is that she was fragile. “The dumb blonde was a role—she was an actress, for God’s sake! “The biggest myth is that she was dumb.