MARILYN MONROE
Marilyn Monroe was born on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, with the name Norma Jeane Mortenson. Her mother Gladys, who is a mentally unstable woman, named her after her favourite actresses: Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow.
The little girl has no father and, for much of her childhood, alternates between stays in orphanages or with temporary families and turbulent returns home. When her mother is diagnosed with schizophrenia by doctors, Norma Jeane is taken into state custody: her legal guardian is Gladys' best friend Grace McKee, a film archivist at Columbia Pictures. It is she who gets the girl interested in film and, a few years later, enrols her in high school where she meets her first husband James Dougherty. The wedding, celebrated in 1942, lasted only four years, an interval during which Norma posed for the photographer André De Dienes, who sent his shots to Emmeline Snively, director of Hollywood's most important advertising agency. Snively convinces her to go blonde.
For the future diva, her relationship with the cinema began at the end of her marriage, when, in 1946, she was put under contract by Fox. In the same year she changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Her debut in front of the camera took place in 1947 with The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, in which she had an exclusively vocal role. Brief appearances in negligible films and a contract with Columbia Pictures followed.
Hollywood, however, soon forgot about her and, following a new dismissal, wanted her back to join the Marx Brothers in A Night on the Roofs. This film brought her luck, because it put her in touch with the talent scout who introduced her to John Huston, his director in The Asphalt Jungle.
During this period, however, Marilyn Monroe was mainly talked about for a nude photo of her included in a sexy calendar and destined to be the centrepiece of the first issue of Playboy. The beginning of the 1950s was a turbulent time for Miss Monroe, marked by a suicide attempt. Her first starring film is Your Mouth is Burning (1952), which attracts mixed reviews.
Unanimous approval came with Niagara, in which Marilyn plays a femme fatale. It is 1953, the year that marks the beginning of the myth for the film star, and roles abound. Monroe also sings, and dances, and no one will forget her numbers in Men Prefer Blondes and the beautiful bespectacled young lady she impersonates in How to Marry a Millionaire. The making of the latter coincides with her marriage to baseball champion Joe Di Maggio.
Despite good intentions, the union proves difficult and the separation comes after nine months, during which Marilyn shoots the sexiest scene of her career, that of the white dress being lifted by the underground wind in When the Wife is on Holiday (1955).
She moved to New York, where she attended the Actor's Studio and met playwright Arthur Miller, whom she married in 1956. This was certainly the happiest period of the diva's stormy existence, which resulted in a Golden Globe nomination for Bus Stop.
Between 1960 and 1962 Marilyn's mental condition deteriorated further. While she succeeded in starring in The Displaced Ones, she was thrown off the set of Something Gotta Give: Monroe plunged into the depths of depression.
On 5 August 1962, she is found lifeless, with no clothes and the telephone receiver in her hand in her bedroom. The doctor speaks of suicide by an overdose of barbiturates, but something does not add up in the reconstruction of events, so much so that even today Marilyn Monroe's death is one of Hollywood's unsolved mysteries.