Monroe, Marilyn, 1926–62, American movie actress, b. Los Angeles as Norma Jean Baker. Raised in orphanages and first married at 14, Monroe became a world-famous sex symbol and, after her death, a Hollywood legend. She was noted for her distinctively breathy singing style and seductive film roles. At first patronized by critics, she studied acting and won more challenging roles. Her death from a barbituate overdose at age 36, a possible suicide, only increased her mystique. Her films include Niagara (1952), The Seven-Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Misfits (1960). Monroe's second husband was Joe DiMaggio DiMaggio, Joe (Joseph Paul DiMaggio) (dĭmăj`ēō', –mäj`ēō')
..... Click the link for more information. and her third was Arthur Miller Miller, Arthur, 1915–2005, American dramatist, b. New York City, grad. Univ. of Michigan, 1938. One of America's most distinguished playwrights, he has been hailed as the finest realist of the 20th-century stage.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See the controversial study by Norman Mailer (1973) and the play After the Fall (1963) by Arthur Miller; biographies by G. McCann (1988), M. Zolotow (rev. ed. 1990), C. E. Rollyson (1993), D. Spoto (1993), and B. Leaming (1998); study by S. Churchwell (2005).

Monroe, Marilyn

orig. Norma Jean Mortenson

Marilyn Monroe.

(credit: Brown Brothers)

(born June 1, 1926, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.—died Aug. 5, 1962, Los Angeles) U.S. film actress. She endured a loveless childhood and a brief teenage marriage. After working as a photographer's model, she made her screen debut in 1948 and won bit parts in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and All About Eve (1950). She achieved stardom as a blonde sex symbol in the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and The Seven Year Itch (1955). After studying at the Actors Studio, she starred in more-ambitious films, including Bus Stop (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Misfits (1961). Her private life, which included marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, was widely publicized. She died at age 36 of an apparently self-administered barbiturate overdose. Her vulnerability and sensuousness combined with her death raised her to the status of an American cultural icon.

Monroe, Marilyn (b. Norma Jean Mortenson) (1926–62) movie actress; born in Los Angeles. For most of her childhood and teen years she was in foster homes or an orphanage because her father abandoned her, while her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, had to work and then was in a mental hospital. (Norma Jean grew up using her mother's last name, Baker, and at age 16 discovered that her father was probably not Mortenson.) In 1942 she married James Dougherty, an aircraft factory worker, and when he went to sea in the merchant marine she took a job in a target airplane factory. Asked to model to illustrate an article in Yank magazine, she soon quit her job to become a full-time model and in 1946, after divorcing Dougherty, she went to Hollywood to try to become an actress. Signed by Twentieth-Century Fox, she changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, but for the next few years she had only minor roles in several movies; during one period of unemployment she posed nude for a pin-up calendar that would later become a collector's item. Not until her small roles in two 1950 movies—The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve —did her career take off, and, promoted as a slightly ditzy blonde exuding a breathless sexuality, she became a star and celebrity. She was married to former baseball star Joe DiMaggio for about nine months during 1954, and then, determined to shed her image as a sex symbol, she began to study at Lee and Paula Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York City. She did give two of her more sophisticated performances—in Bus Stop (1956) and Some Like It Hot (1959)—and she was married to the playwright Arthur Miller (1956–61) and even starred in a movie he wrote for her, The Misfits (1961); but her life continued in its roller coaster fashion: she was briefly hospitalized in a mental clinic, she was dropped from a movie for failure to show up on time, and she was taking drugs for her various problems. She took her own life with an overdose of barbiturates, and after several years in which she was discussed almost entirely in terms of a sex goddess, she came to be perceived as a symbol of the exploitation of women by Hollywood and men in general.