Monroe at the Actors
Studio
After founding MMP, Monroe moved to Manhattan and spent 1955
studying acting. She took classes with Constance Collier and attended workshops
on method acting at the Actors Studio, run by Lee Strasberg. She grew close to Strasberg and his wife
Paula, receiving private lessons at their home due to her shyness, and soon
became a family member. She replaced her
old acting coach, Natasha Lytess, with Paula; the Strasbergs remained an
important influence for the rest of her career.
Monroe also started undergoing psychoanalysis, as Strasberg believed
that an actor must confront their emotional traumas and use them in their
performances.
Monroe continued her relationship with DiMaggio despite the
ongoing divorce process; she also dated actor Marlon Brando and playwright
Arthur Miller. She had first been
introduced to Miller by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. The affair between Monroe and Miller became
increasingly serious after October 1955, when her divorce was finalized and he
separated from his wife. The studio
urged her to end it, as Miller was being investigated by the FBI for
allegations of communism and had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American
Activities Committee, but Monroe refused. The relationship led to FBI opening a file on
her.
By the end of the year, Monroe and Fox signed a new
seven-year contract, as MMP would not be able to finance films alone, and the
studio was eager to have Monroe working for them again. Fox would pay her $400,000 to make four films,
and granted her the right to choose her own projects, directors and
cinematographers. She would also be free to make one film with
MMP per each completed film for Fox.
1956–1959: Critical
acclaim and marriage to Arthur Miller
Monroe began 1956 by announcing her win over 20th
Century-Fox. The press now wrote
favorably about her decision to fight the studio; Time called her a
"shrewd businesswoman" and Look predicted that the win would be
"an example of the individual against the herd for years to come". In contrast, Monroe's relationship with Miller
prompted some negative comments, such as Walter Winchell's statement that
"America's best-known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the
left-wing intelligentsia."
In March, Monroe began filming the drama Bus Stop, her first film under the new
contract. She played Chérie, a saloon
singer whose dreams of stardom are complicated by a naïve cowboy who falls in
love with her. For the role, she learned an Ozark accent, chose costumes and
make-up that lacked the glamour of her earlier films, and provided deliberately
mediocre singing and dancing. Broadway
director Joshua Logan agreed to direct, despite initially doubting her acting
abilities and knowing of her reputation for being difficult. The filming took place in Idaho and Arizona,
with Monroe "technically in charge" as the head of MMP, occasionally
making decisions on cinematography and with Logan adapting to her chronic lateness
and perfectionism. The experience
changed Logan's opinion of Monroe, and he later compared her to Charlie Chaplin
in her ability to blend comedy and tragedy.
On June 29, Monroe and Miller were married at the
Westchester County Court in White Plains, New York; two days later they had a
Jewish ceremony at the home of Kay Brown, Miller's literary agent, in Waccabuc,
New York. With the marriage, Monroe
converted to Judaism, which led Egypt to ban all of her films. Due to Monroe's status as a sex symbol and
Miller's image as an intellectual, the media saw the union as a mismatch, as
evidenced by Variety's headline, "Egghead Weds Hourglass".
Bus Stop was
released in August 1956 and became critical and commercial success. The Saturday Review of Literature wrote that
Monroe's performance "effectively dispels once and for all the notion that
she is merely a glamour personality" and Crowther proclaimed: "Hold
on to your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn
Monroe has finally proved herself an actress." She also received a Golden Globe for Best
Actress nomination for her performance.[
In August, Monroe also began filming MMP's first independent
production, The Prince and the Showgirl,
at Pinewood Studios in England. Based on a play about an affair between a
showgirl and a prince in the 1910s, it was to be directed, co-produced and co-starred
by Laurence Olivier. The production was
complicated by conflicts between him and Monroe. He angered her with the patronizing statement
"All you have to do is be sexy" and his attempts to get her to
replicate Vivien Leigh's interpretation of the character in the stage version. He also disliked the constant presence of
Paula Strasberg, Monroe's acting coach, on set. In retaliation, Monroe became
uncooperative and began to deliberately arrive late, stating later that
"if you don't respect your artists, they can't work well."
Monroe also experienced other problems during the
production. Her dependence on pharmaceuticals escalated and, according to Spoto,
she had a miscarriage. She and Greene
also argued over how MMP should be run. Despite
the difficulties, filming was completed on schedule by the end of 1956. The
Prince and the Showgirl was released to mixed reviews in June 1957 and proved
unpopular with American audiences. It
was better received in Europe, where she was awarded the Italian David di
Donatello and the French Crystal Star awards and was nominated for a BAFTA.
After returning from England, Monroe took an 18-month hiatus
to concentrate on family life. She and Miller split their time between NYC, Connecticut
and Long Island. She had an ectopic
pregnancy in mid-1957, and a miscarriage a year later; these problems were
mostly likely linked to her endometriosis. Monroe was also briefly hospitalized due to a
barbiturate overdose. As she and Greene
could not settle their disagreements over MMP, Monroe bought his share of the
company.
Monroe returned to Hollywood in July 1958 to act opposite
Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder's comedy on gender roles, Some Like It Hot. She
considered the role of Sugar Kane another "dumb blonde", but accepted
it due to Miller's encouragement and the offer of ten percent of the film's
profits on top of her standard pay. The
film's difficult production has since become "legendary". Monroe demanded dozens of re-takes, and did
not remember her lines or act as directed—Curtis famously stated that kissing
her was "like kissing Hitler" due to the number of re-takes. Monroe herself privately likened the
production to a sinking ship and commented on her co-stars and director saying
"[but] why should I worry, I have no phallic symbol to lose." Many of the problems stemmed from her and
Wilder—who also had a reputation for being difficult—disagreeing on how she
should play the role. She angered him by
asking to alter many of her scenes, which in turn made her stage fright worse,
and it is suggested that she deliberately ruined several scenes to act them her
way.
In the end, Wilder was happy with Monroe's performance and
stated: "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!" Some
Like It Hot became a critical and commercial success when it was released
in March 1959. Monroe's performance
earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress, and prompted Variety to call her
"a comedienne with that combination of sex appeal and timing that just
can't be beat". It has been voted
one of the best films ever made in polls by the BBC, the American Film Institute,
and Sight & Sound.
1960–1962: Career
decline and personal difficulties
After Some Like It Hot,
Monroe took another hiatus until late 1959, when she starred in the musical
comedy Let's Make Love. She chose George Cukor to direct and Miller
re-wrote some of the script, which she considered weak; she accepted the part
solely because she was behind on her contract with Fox. The film's production was delayed by her frequent
absences from the set. During the shoot, Monroe had an extramarital
affair with her co-star Yves Montand, which was widely reported by the press
and used in the film's publicity campaign. Let's
Make Love was unsuccessful upon its release in September 1960; Crowther
described Monroe as appearing "rather untidy" and "lacking ...
the old Monroe dynamism", and Hedda Hopper called the film "the most
vulgar picture [Monroe's] ever done". Truman Capote lobbied for Monroe to
play Holly Golightly in a film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the role went to Audrey Hepburn as its
producers feared that she would complicate the production.
The last film that Monroe completed was John Huston's The Misfits, which Miller had written to
provide her with a dramatic role. She
played a recently divorced woman who becomes friends with three aging cowboys,
played by Clark Gable, Eli Wallach and Montgomery Clift. The filming in the
Nevada desert between July and November 1960 was again difficult. Monroe and Miller's marriage was effectively
over, and he began a new relationship with set photographer Inge Morath. Monroe disliked that he had based her role
partly on her life, and thought it inferior to the male roles; she also
struggled with Miller's habit of re-writing scenes the night before filming. Her health was also failing: she was in pain
from gallstones, and her drug addiction was so severe that her make-up usually
had to be applied while she was still asleep under the influence of
barbiturates. In August, filming was
halted for her to spend a week in a hospital detox. Despite her problems, Huston stated that when
Monroe was acting, she "was not pretending to an emotion. It was the real
thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into
consciousness."
Monroe and Miller separated after filming wrapped, and she
obtained a Mexican divorce in January 1961. The
Misfits was released the following month, failing at the box office. Its reviews were mixed, with Variety
complaining of frequently "choppy" character development, and Bosley
Crowther calling Monroe "completely blank and unfathomable" and
stating that "unfortunately for the film's structure, everything turns
upon her". It has received more
favorable reviews in the twenty-first century. Geoff Andrew of the British Film
Institute has called it a classic, Huston scholar Tony Tracy has described
Monroe's performance the "most mature interpretation of her career", and
Geoffrey McNab of The Independent has praised her for being
"extraordinary" in portraying the character's "power of
empathy".
Monroe was next to star in a television adaptation of W.
Somerset Maugham's Rain for NBC, but
the project fell through as the network did not want to hire her choice of
director, Lee Strasberg. Instead of
working, she spent the first six months of 1961 preoccupied by health problems.
She underwent a cholecystectomy and surgery for her endometriosis, and spent
four weeks hospitalized for depression. She was helped by ex-husband Joe DiMaggio,
with whom she rekindled a friendship, and dated his friend, Frank Sinatra, for
several months. Monroe also moved
permanently back to California in 1961, purchasing a house at 12305 Fifth
Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles in early 1962.
Monroe returned to the public eye in the spring of 1962; she
received a "World Film Favorite" Golden Globe Award and began to
shoot a film for Fox, Something's Got to
Give, a remake of My Favorite Wife
(1940). It was to be co-produced by MMP,
directed by George Cukor and to co-star Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. Days before filming began, Monroe caught sinusitis;
despite medical advice to postpone the production, Fox began it as planned in
late April. Monroe was too sick to work
for the majority of the next six weeks, but despite confirmations by multiple
doctors, the studio pressurized her by alleging publicly that she was faking
it. On May 19, she took a break to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President"
on stage at President John F. Kennedy's early birthday celebration at Madison
Square Garden in New York. She drew
attention with her costume: a beige, skintight dress covered in rhinestones,
which made her appear nude. Monroe's
trip to New York caused even more irritation for Fox executives, who had wanted
her to cancel it.
Monroe next filmed a scene for Something's Got to Give in which she swam naked in a swimming pool.
To generate advance publicity, the press
was invited to take photographs; these were later published in Life. This was
the first time that a major star had posed nude at the height of their
career. When she was again on sick leave
for several days, Fox decided that it could not afford to have another film
running behind schedule when it was already struggling with the rising costs of
Cleopatra (1963). On June 7, Fox fired Monroe and sued her for
$750,000 in damages. She was replaced by
Lee Remick, but after Martin refused to make the film with anyone other than
Monroe, Fox sued him as well and shut down the production. The studio blamed Monroe for the film's demise
and began spreading negative publicity about her, even alleging that she was
mentally disturbed.
Fox soon regretted its decision and re-opened negotiations
with Monroe later in June; a settlement about a new contract, including
re-commencing Something's Got to Give
and a starring role in the black comedy What
a Way to Go! (1964), was reached later that summer. She was also planning on starring in a biopic
of Jean Harlow. To repair her public
image, Monroe engaged in several publicity ventures, including interviews for
Life and Cosmopolitan and her first photo shoot for Vogue. For Vogue, she and photographer Bert Stern
collaborated for two series of photographs, one a standard fashion editorial
and another of her posing nude, which were published posthumously with the
title The Last Sitting.
Death
During her final months, Monroe lived at 12305 Fifth Helena
Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Her housekeeper Eunice Murray was staying
overnight at the home on the evening of Saturday, August 4, 1962. Murray awoke at 3:00 a.m. on August 5 and
sensed that something was wrong. She saw light from under Monroe's bedroom
door, but was unable to get a response and found the door locked. Murray then
called Monroe's psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who arrived at the house
shortly after and broke into the bedroom through a window, finding Monroe dead
in her bed. Monroe's physician, Dr.
Hyman Engelberg, arrived at around 3:50 a.m. and pronounced her dead at the
scene. At 4:25 a.m., they notified the Los Angeles Police Department.
Monroe died between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on August 4,
and the toxicology report showed that the cause of death was acute barbiturate
poisoning. She had 8 mg% (milligrams per 100 milliliters of solution) chloral
hydrate and 4.5 mg% of pentobarbital (Nembutal) in her blood, and 13 mg% of pentobarbital
in her liver. Empty medicine bottles were
found next to her bed. The possibility
that Monroe had accidentally overdosed was ruled out because the dosages found
in her body were several times over the lethal limit.
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office was assisted in their
investigation by the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, who had expert
knowledge on suicide. Monroe's doctors
stated that she had been "prone to severe fears and frequent
depressions" with "abrupt and unpredictable mood changes", and
had overdosed several times in the past, possibly intentionally. Due to these facts and the lack of any
indication of foul play, deputy coroner Thomas Noguchi classified her death as
a probable suicide.
Monroe's sudden death was front-page news in the United
States and Europe. According to Lois
Banner, "it's said that the suicide rate in Los Angeles doubled the month
after she died; the circulation rate of most newspapers expanded that month",
and the Chicago Tribune reported that they had received hundreds of phone calls
from members of the public who were requesting information about her
death. French artist Jean Cocteau commented that her
death "should serve as a terrible lesson to all those, whose chief
occupation consists of spying on and tormenting film stars", her former
co-star Laurence Olivier deemed her "the complete victim of ballyhoo and
sensation", and Bus Stop director Joshua Logan stated that she was
"one of the most unappreciated people in the world". Her funeral, held at the Westwood Village
Memorial Park Cemetery on August 8, was private and attended by only her
closest associates. The service was arranged by Joe DiMaggio and
Monroe's business manager Inez Melson. Hundreds of spectators crowded the streets
around the cemetery. Monroe was later
entombed at Crypt No. 24 at the Corridor of Memories.
In the following decades, several conspiracy theories,
including murder and accidental overdose, have been introduced to contradict
suicide as the cause of Monroe's death. The speculation that Monroe had been
murdered first gained mainstream attention with the publication of Norman Mailer's Marilyn: A Biography in 1973,
and in the following years became widespread enough for the Los Angeles County
District Attorney John Van de Kamp to conduct a "threshold
investigation" in 1982 to see whether a criminal investigation should be
opened. No evidence of foul play was found.
Screen persona and
reception
Poster for Jean Harlow's film The Girl From Missouri. The background is lilac, with large black
letters on top stating "Jean Harlow" and below them, the title of the
film in blue. Her co-stars (Lionel Barrymore, Franchot Tone, Lewis Stone) are
listed below the title in much smaller font, with director Jack Conway's name
in even smaller print below them. The two lower thirds of the poster are taken
up by Harlow's head shot: she is pictured with her head thrown backwards in
laughter. She has curled, platinum blonde hair, thin, arched eyebrows and red
lips, and she is wearing a lilac gown that exposes her shoulders. Next to her
on the left is the text "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures".
The 1940s had been the heyday for actresses who were
perceived as tough and smart—such as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck—who
had appealed to women-dominated audiences during the war years. 20th
Century-Fox wanted Monroe to be a star of the new decade that would draw men to
movie theaters, and saw her as a replacement for the aging Betty Grable, their
most popular "blonde bombshell" of the 1940s. According to film scholar Richard Dyer,
Monroe's star image was crafted mostly for the male gaze.
From the beginning, Monroe played a significant part in the
creation of her public image, and towards the end of her career exerted almost
full control over it. She devised many
of her publicity strategies, cultivated friendships with gossip columnists such
as Sidney Skolsky and Louella Parsons, and controlled the use of her images. In addition to Grable, she was often compared
to another iconic blonde, 1930s film star Jean Harlow. The comparison was
prompted partly by Monroe, who named Harlow as her childhood idol, wanted to play
her in a biopic, and even employed Harlow's hair stylist to color her hair.
Monroe's screen persona focused on her blonde hair and the
stereotypes that were associated with it, especially dumbness, naïveté, sexual
availability and artificiality. She
often used a breathy, childish voice in her films, and in interviews gave the
impression that everything she said was "utterly innocent and
uncalculated", parodying herself with double entendres that came to be
known as "Monroeisms". For example, when she was asked what she had
on in the 1949 nude photo shoot, she replied, "I had the radio on".
In her films, Monroe usually played "the girl",
who is defined solely by her gender. Her
roles were almost always chorus girls, secretaries, or models; occupations
where "the woman is on show, there for the pleasure of men." Monroe
began her career as a pin-up model, and was noted for her hourglass
figure. She was often positioned in film
scenes so that her curvy silhouette was on display, and often posed like a pin-up
in publicity photos. Her distinctive,
hip-swinging walk also drew attention to her body and earned her the nickname
"the girl with the horizontal walk". Monroe often wore white to emphasize her
blondness and drew attention by wearing revealing outfits that showed off her
figure. Her publicity stunts often
revolved around her clothing either being shockingly revealing or even
malfunctioning, such as when a shoulder strap of her dress snapped during a
press conference.
In press stories, Monroe was portrayed as the embodiment of
the American Dream, a girl who had
risen from a miserable childhood to Hollywood stardom. Stories of her time spent in foster families
and an orphanage were exaggerated and even partly fabricated. Film scholar Thomas Harris wrote that her
working-class roots and lack of family made her appear more sexually available,
"the ideal playmate", in contrast to her contemporary, Grace Kelly,
who was also marketed as an attractive blonde, but due to her upper-class
background was seen as a sophisticated actress, unattainable for the majority
of male viewers.
Although Monroe's screen persona as a dim-witted but
sexually attractive blonde was a carefully crafted act, audiences and film
critics believed it to be her real personality. This became an obstacle when
she wanted to pursue other kinds of roles, or to be respected as a
businesswoman. Academic Sarah Churchwell
studied narratives about Monroe and has stated:
The biggest myth is
that she was dumb. The second is that she was fragile. The third is that she
couldn't act. She was far from dumb, although she was not formally educated,
and she was very sensitive about that. But she was very smart indeed—and very
tough. She had to be both to beat the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s.
[...] The dumb blonde was a role—she was an actress, for heaven's sake! Such a
good actress that no one now believes she was anything but what she portrayed
on screen.
Biographer Lois Banner has written that Monroe often subtly
parodied her status as a sex symbol in her films and public appearances, and
that "the 'Marilyn Monroe' character she created was a brilliant
archetype, which stands between Mae West and Madonna in the tradition of
twentieth-century gender tricksters." Monroe herself stated that she was
influenced by West, learning "a few tricks from her—that impression of
laughing at, or mocking, her own sexuality". She studied comedy in classes by mime and dancer
Lotte Goslar, famous for her comic stage performances, and Goslar also instructed
her on film sets. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, one of the
films in which she played an archetypal dumb blonde, Monroe had the sentence
"I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it" added
to her character's lines.
"I never quite
understood it, this sex symbol. I always thought symbols were those things you
clash together! That's the trouble; a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate
to be a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something I'd rather have it
sex than some other things they've got symbols of."—Monroe in an interview for Life in 1962
According to Dyer, Monroe became "virtually a household
name for sex" in the 1950s and "her image has to be situated in the
flux of ideas about morality and sexuality that characterised the fifties in
America", such as Freudian ideas about sex, the Kinsey report (1953), and
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963).
By appearing vulnerable and unaware of
her sex appeal, Monroe was the first sex symbol to present sex as natural and
without danger, in contrast to the 1940s femme fatales. Spoto likewise describes her as the
embodiment of "the postwar ideal of the American girl, soft, transparently
needy, worshipful of men, naïve, offering sex without demands", which is
echoed in Molly Haskell's statement that "she was the fifties fiction, the
lie that a woman had no sexual needs, that she is there to cater to, or
enhance, a man's needs." Monroe's
contemporary Norman Mailer wrote that "Marilyn suggested sex might be
difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her", while
Groucho Marx characterized her as "Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all
rolled into one". According to
Haskell, due to her status as a sex symbol, Monroe was less popular with women
than with men, as they "couldn't identify with her and didn't support
her", although this would change after her death.
Dyer has also argued that Monroe's blonde hair became her
defining feature because it made her "racially unambiguous" and
exclusively white just as the civil rights movement was beginning, and that she
should be seen as emblematic of racism in twentieth-century popular culture. Banner
agreed that it may not be a coincidence that Monroe launched a trend of
platinum blonde actresses during the civil rights movement, but has also
criticized Dyer, pointing out that in her highly publicized private life,
Monroe associated with people who were seen as "white ethnics", such
as Joe DiMaggio (Italian-American) and Arthur Miller (Jewish). According to Banner, she sometimes challenged
prevailing racial norms in her publicity photographs; for example, in an image
featured in Look in 1951, she was shown in revealing clothes while practicing
with African-American singing coach Phil Moore.
Monroe was perceived as a specifically American star,
"a national institution as well-known as hot dogs, apple pie, or baseball"
according to Photoplay. Banner calls her
the symbol of populuxe, a star whose joyful and glamorous public image "helped
the nation cope with its paranoia in the 1950s about the Cold War, the atom
bomb, and the totalitarian communist Soviet Union". Historian Fiona Handyside writes that the
French female audiences associated whiteness/blondness with American modernity
and cleanliness, and so Monroe came to symbolize a modern,
"liberated" woman whose life takes place in the public sphere. Film historian Laura Mulvey has written of her
as an endorsement for American consumer culture:
If America was to
export the democracy of glamour into post-war, impoverished Europe, the movies
could be its shop window ... Marilyn Monroe, with her all American attributes
and streamlined sexuality, came to epitomize in a single image this complex
interface of the economic, the political, and the erotic. By the mid-1950s, she
stood for a brand of classless glamour, available to anyone using American
cosmetics, nylons and peroxide.
Twentieth Century-Fox further profited from Monroe's
popularity by cultivating several lookalike actresses, such as Jayne Mansfield
and Sheree North. Other studios also
attempted to create their own Monroes: Universal Pictures with Mamie Van Doren,
Columbia Pictures with Kim Novak, and Rank Organization with Diana Dors.
Legacy
According to The Guide to United States Popular Culture,
"as an icon of American popular culture, Monroe's few rivals in popularity
include Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse ... no other star has ever inspired such
a wide range of emotions—from lust to pity, from envy to remorse." Art historian Gail Levin stated that Monroe
may have been "the most photographed person of the 20th century", and
The American Film Institute has named her the sixth greatest female screen
legend in American film history. The Smithsonian Institution has included her
on their list of "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time", and
both Variety and VH1 have placed her in the top ten in their rankings of the
greatest popular culture icons of the twentieth century.
Hundreds of books have been written about Monroe. She has
been the subject of films, plays, operas, and songs, and has influenced artists
and entertainers such as Andy Warhol and Madonna. She also remains a valuable brand: her image and name have been licensed for
hundreds of products, and she has been featured in advertising for brands such
as Max Factor, Chanel, Mercedes-Benz, and Absolut Vodka.
Monroe's enduring popularity is linked to her conflicted
public image. On the one hand, she remains a sex symbol, beauty icon and one of
the most famous stars of classical Hollywood cinema. On the other, she is also remembered for her
troubled private life, unstable childhood, struggle for professional respect,
as well as her death and the conspiracy theories that surrounded it. She has been written about by scholars and
journalists who are interested in gender and feminism; these writers include
Gloria Steinem, Jacqueline Rose, Molly Haskell, Sarah Churchwell, and Lois
Banner. Some, such as Steinem, have
viewed her as a victim of the studio system.
Others, such as Haskell, Rose, and Churchwell, have instead stressed
Monroe's proactive role in her career and her participation in the creation of
her public persona.
Due to the contrast between her stardom and troubled private
life, Monroe is closely linked to broader discussions about modern phenomena
such as mass media, fame, and consumer culture.
According to academic Susanne Hamscha, Monroe has continued relevance to
ongoing discussions about modern society, and she is "never completely
situated in one time or place" but has become "a surface on which
narratives of American culture can be (re-)constructed", and
"functions as a cultural type that can be reproduced, transformed, translated
into new contexts, and enacted by other people". Similarly, Banner has called Monroe the
"eternal shapeshifter" who is re-created by "each generation,
even each individual ... to their own specifications".
Monroe remains a cultural icon, but critics are divided on
her legacy as an actress. David Thomson called her body of work
"insubstantial" and Pauline Kael wrote that she could not act, but
rather "used her lack of an actress's skills to amuse the public. She had
the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting—and vice
versa; she did what others had the 'good taste' not to do". In contrast, Peter Bradshaw wrote that Monroe
was a talented comedian who "understood how comedy achieved its
effects", and Roger Ebert wrote that "Monroe's eccentricities and
neuroses on sets became notorious, but studios put up with her long after any
other actress would have been blackballed because what they got back on the
screen was magical". Similarly,
Jonathan Rosenbaum stated that "she subtly subverted the sexist content of
her material" and that "the difficulty some people have discerning
Monroe's intelligence as an actress seems rooted in the ideology of a
repressive era, when superfeminine women weren't supposed to be smart".
Filmography
Dangerous Years (1947)
Scudda Hoo! Scudda
Hay! (1948)
Ladies of the Chorus
(1948)
Love Happy (1949)
A Ticket to Tomahawk
(1950)
The Asphalt Jungle
(1950)
All About Eve (1950)
The Fireball (1950)
Right Cross (1951)
Home Town Story (1951)
As Young as You Feel
(1951)
Love Nest (1951)
Let's Make It Legal
(1951)
Clash by Night (1952)
We're Not Married!
(1952)
Don't Bother to Knock
(1952)
Monkey Business (1952)
O. Henry's Full House
(1952)
Niagara (1953)
Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes (1953)
How to Marry a
Millionaire (1953)
River of No Return
(1954)
There's No Business
Like Show Business (1954)
The Seven Year Itch
(1955)
Bus Stop (1956)
The Prince and the
Showgirl (1957)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Let's Make Love (1960)
The Misfits (1961)
Something's Got to Give (1962–unfinished)
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