Marilyn monroe film actress

Marilyn is a kind of ultimate. She is uniquely feminine. Everything she does is different, strange, and exciting, from the way she talks to the way she uses that magnificent torso. She makes a man proud to be a man. Monroe returned to Hollywood to resume filming on the George Cukor comedy Something's Got to Give, but the film was never finished and has become legendary for "problems on the set".

In May , she made her last significant public appearance, singing Happy Birthday at a televised birthday party for Pres. John F. Already in a financial strain due to production costs of Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Fox dropped Monroe from the film and replaced her with Lee Remick. However, co-star Dean Martin was unwilling to work with anyone else but Monroe.

She was rehired. Monroe conducted a lengthy interview with LIFE Magazine, [6] in which she expressed bitterness over Hollywood labeling her as a dumb blonde and her love for her audience. She also did a photo shoot for Vogue , and began discussing a future film project with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Other projects being considered for her were What a Way to Go!

Before the shooting of Something's Got to Give resumed, Monroe was found dead in her Los Angeles home, on the morning of August 5, She remains one of the twentieth century's most legendary public figures and archetypal Hollywood movie stars. Monroe married James Dougherty on June 19, , when she was 16 years old. She always maintained theirs was a marriage of convenience arranged by Grace Goddard.

She moved out of her mother-in-law's home and stopped writing to Dougherty. She filed for divorce in Las Vegas, Nevada; it was finalized on September 13, In baseball player Joe DiMaggio saw a picture of Monroe with two Chicago White Sox players, but did not ask the man who arranged the stunt to set up a date until She wrote in My Story that she did not want to meet him, fearing a stereotypical jock.

During the honeymoon, they traveled to Japan and along the way she was asked to visit American soldiers in Korea by U. General Christenberry. She performed ten shows over four days in freezing temperatures for over , servicemen. I love you till my heart could burst…. I want to just be where you are and be just what you want me to be….

I want someday for you to be proud of me as a person and as your wife and as the mother of the rest of your children two at least! I've decided …. Joe, knowing the power and hollowness of fame, wanted desperately to head off what he was convinced was her "collision-course with disaster. DiMaggio just blew up. Her makeup man Allan Snyder recalled Monroe later appeared on set with bruises on her upper arms.

She filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty days after the wedding. Years later, she turned to him for help. In February , her psychiatrist arranged for her to be admitted to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. Unable to check herself out, she called DiMaggio, who secured her release. She later joined him in Florida. Their "just good friends" claim did not stop rumors of remarriage.

According to legend, on August 1, DiMaggio—alarmed by how his ex-wife had fallen in with people he felt detrimental to her, such as Frank Sinatra and his "Rat Pack"—quit his job with a PX supplier to ask her to remarry him. He claimed her body five days later and arranged her funeral , barring Hollywood's elite. For 20 years, he had a dozen red roses delivered to her crypt three times a week.

Unlike her other two husbands, he never talked about her publicly, never wrote a "tell-all," nor remarried. He died on March 8, , of lung cancer. Nominally raised as a Christian, she converted to Judaism before marrying Miller. After she finished shooting The Prince and the Showgirl, the couple returned to the United States from England and discovered she was pregnant.

However, she suffered from endometriosis and the pregnancy was found to be ectopic. In , the company that employed Doc Goddard relocated him to West Virginia. Both were rather skeptical: Dougherty thought Monroe was rather young to marry, and Monroe was nervous. Monroe married Dougherty on June 19, , just after her 16th birthday, at the home of family friends named the Howells.

That night, Monroe was a popular dancing partner, while Dougherty was relatively ignored. Jealous, he told her that they were leaving. When Monroe told him she might go back to the dance alone, he told her that she would not be allowed to come home if she did. In April , Dougherty was shipped out to the Pacific , where he remained for most of the next two years.

They continued to stay in touch throughout Monroe's career. After Dougherty left, Monroe moved in with Dougherty's parents and began a job at the Radioplane Company , a munitions factory in Van Nuys, to help the war effort. The agency deemed Monroe's figure more suitable for pin-up than high fashion modeling, and she was featured mostly in advertisements and men's magazines.

Camera , Laff , and Peek. Through Snively, Monroe signed a contract with an acting agency in June Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, [ 79 ] but he gave her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe spent her first six months at Fox learning acting, singing, and dancing, and observing the film-making process.

Scudda Hay! Monroe was determined to make it as an actress, and continued studying at the Actors' Lab. She had a small role in the play Glamour Preferred at the Bliss-Hayden Theater , but it ended after a couple of performances. Schenck , who persuaded his friend Harry Cohn , the head executive of Columbia Pictures , to sign her in March At Columbia, Monroe's look was modeled after Rita Hayworth and her hair was bleached platinum blonde.

When her contract at Columbia ended, Monroe returned again to modeling. She shot a commercial for Pabst beer and posed for artistic nude photographs by Tom Kelley for John Baumgarth [ 99 ] calendars, using the name 'Mona Monroe'. However, in , the often-critical Davis praised Monroe's performance, saying, "Oh, I knew she had a long way to go.

Definitely, no question, I knew she was going to make it. She was a very ambitious girl, [and] knew what she wanted [and was] very serious about it I thought she had talent. Despite her screen time being only a few minutes in the latter, she gained a mention in Photoplay and according to biographer Donald Spoto "moved effectively from movie model to serious actress".

Her popularity with audiences was also growing: she received several thousand fan letters a week, and was declared "Miss Cheesecake of " by the army newspaper Stars and Stripes , reflecting the preferences of soldiers in the Korean War. Monroe found herself at the center of a scandal in March , when she revealed publicly that she had posed for a nude calendar in In the wake of the scandal, Monroe was featured on the cover of Life magazine as the "Talk of Hollywood", and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper declared her the "cheesecake queen" turned "box office smash".

Despite her newfound popularity as a sex symbol, Monroe also wished to showcase more of her acting range. She had begun taking acting classes with Michael Chekhov and mime Lotte Goslar soon after beginning the Fox contract, [ ] and Clash by Night and Don't Bother to Knock showed her in different roles. Monroe's three other films in continued with her typecasting in comedic roles that highlighted her sex appeal.

In We're Not Married! Henry's Full House , with Charles Laughton she appeared in a passing vignette as a nineteenth-century street walker. During this period, Monroe gained a reputation for being difficult to work with, which would worsen as her career progressed. She was often late or did not show up at all, did not remember her lines, and would demand several re-takes before she was satisfied with her performance.

Monroe starred in three movies that were released in and emerged as a major sex symbol and one of Hollywood's most bankable performers. When Niagara was released in January , women's clubs protested it as immoral, but it proved popular with audiences. While Niagara made Monroe a sex symbol and established her "look", her second film of , the satirical musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , cemented her screen persona as a " dumb blonde ".

Monroe's role was originally intended for Betty Grable , who had been 20th Century-Fox's most popular " blonde bombshell " in the s; Monroe was fast eclipsing her as a star who could appeal to both male and female audiences. It was the second film ever released in CinemaScope , a widescreen format that Fox hoped would draw audiences back to theaters as television was beginning to cause losses to film studios.

Monroe had become one of 20th Century-Fox's biggest stars, but her contract had not changed since , so that she was paid far less than other stars of her stature and could not choose her projects. Zanuck , who had a strong personal dislike of her and did not think she would earn the studio as much revenue in other types of roles. Marines over a four-day period.

In April , Otto Preminger 's western River of No Return , the last film that Monroe had filmed prior to the suspension, was released. She called it a " Z-grade cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery and the CinemaScope process", but it was popular with audiences. In September , Monroe began filming Billy Wilder 's comedy The Seven Year Itch , starring opposite Tom Ewell as a woman who becomes the object of her married neighbor's sexual fantasies.

Although the film was shot in Hollywood, the studio decided to generate advance publicity by staging the filming of a scene in which Monroe is standing on a subway grate with the air blowing up the skirt of her white dress on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. The publicity stunt placed Monroe on international front pages, and it also marked the end of her marriage to DiMaggio.

After filming for The Seven Year Itch wrapped up in November , Monroe left Hollywood for the East Coast, where she and photographer Milton Greene founded their own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions MMP —an action that has later been called "instrumental" in the collapse of the studio system. She took classes with Constance Collier and attended workshops on method acting at the Actors Studio , run by Lee Strasberg.

Monroe continued her relationship with DiMaggio despite the ongoing divorce process; she was also rumored to have dated actor Marlon Brando. 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. Monroe began by announcing her win over 20th Century-Fox.

For the role, she learned an Ozark accent , chose costumes and makeup that lacked the glamor of her earlier films, and provided deliberately mediocre singing and dancing. Bus Stop was released in August and became a critical and commercial success. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress. Monroe also experienced other problems during the production.

Her dependence on pharmaceuticals escalated and, according to Spoto, she had a miscarriage. After returning from England, Monroe took an month hiatus to concentrate on family life. In the end, Wilder was happy with Monroe's performance, saying: "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!

She accepted the part solely because she was behind on her contract with Fox. While one report owes it to a suicide attempt, another claims that Monroe was feeling overcome with personal issues and telephoned psychoanalyst Marianne Kris, who committed her to the ward for "exhaustion". Four days after her arrival, DiMaggio helped get her released.

There was no empathy at Payne-Whitney — it had a very bad effect — they asked me after putting me in a 'cell' I mean cement blocks and all for very disturbed depressed patients except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn't happy there everything was under lock and key; things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows — the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time, also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients.

I answered: 'Well, I'd have to be nuts if I like it here'. I sat on the bed trying to figure if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation what would I do. So I figured, it's a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak but I got the idea from a movie I made once called 'Don't Bother to Knock'. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life—against the glass intentionally.

It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass—so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. The last film Monroe completed was John Huston 's film The Misfits , which Miller had written to provide her with a dramatic role. 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 rewriting scenes the night before filming. 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 Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute has called it a classic, [ ] Huston scholar Tony Tracy called Monroe's performance the "most mature interpretation of her career", [ ] and Geoffrey McNab of The Independent praised her "extraordinary" portrayal of 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. She underwent a cholecystectomy and surgery for her endometriosis, and spent four weeks hospitalized for depression. Monroe returned to the public eye in the spring of Despite medical advice to postpone the production, Fox began it as planned in late April.

President " on stage at President John F. Monroe next filmed a scene for Something's Got to Give in which she swam naked in a swimming pool. This was the first time that a major star had posed nude at the height of their career. Fox soon regretted its decision and reopened negotiations with Monroe later in June; a settlement about a new contract, including recommencing Something's Got to Give and a starring role in the black comedy What a Way to Go!

Her housekeeper Eunice Murray was staying overnight at the home on the evening of August 4, 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 Ralph Greenson , who arrived at the house shortly after and broke into the bedroom through a window. He found a nude Monroe dead in her bed, covered by a sheet, with her hand clamped around a telephone receiver.

At a. Monroe died between p. It could have been an accident, because I had just talked to her a short time before.

Marilyn monroe film actress

She told me what she had planned to do, she had just bought a new house and she was working on the curtains of the windows. She had so many things to look forward to and she was so happy. Monroe's sudden death was front-page news in the United States and Europe. Her funeral, held at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on August 8, was private and attended by only her closest associates.

I love you. 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 s 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.

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. In her films, Monroe usually played "the beautiful blonde girl", who is defined solely by her gender. Monroe often wore white to emphasize her blondness and drew attention by wearing revealing outfits that showed off her figure.

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 a hindrance when she wanted to pursue other kinds of roles, or to be respected as a businesswoman. The biggest myth is that she was dumb. The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

Granta Books. Hall, Susan G. Greenwood Publishing Group. Hyatt, Wesley Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kidder, Clark Iola, WI: Krause Publications. Lefkowitz, Frances Marilyn Monroe. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Rollyson, Carl Schneider, Michel Marilyn's Last Sessions. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Spoto, Donald Marilyn Monroe: The Biography.

Super, John C. The Fifties in America. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. Vogel, Michelle 24 April External links [ edit ]. Performances and accolades Death. Pink dress White dress John F. Kennedy birthday dress. Categories : Actress filmographies Lists of awards received by American actress Marilyn Monroe American filmographies. Three Rivers Press. Meyers, Jeffrey University of Illinois Press.

My Sister Marilyn. Algonquin Books. Monroe, Marilyn Comment, Bernard ed. Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Riese, Randall; Hitchens, Neal The Unabridged Marilyn. Corgi Books. Rollyson, Carl Rowman and Littlefield. Solomon, Matthew In Palmer, R. Barton ed. Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the s.

Rutgers University Press. Spoto, Donald Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. Cooper Square Press. Steinem, Gloria; Barris, George Victor Gollancz Ltd.