PARIS, Sept 5 — Marilyn Monroe’s short life, now dramatised in a new Netflix movie getting its world premiere in Venice this week, was as tragic as it was glamourous.
A snapshot in dates of one of Hollywood’s eternal stars:
1926: Norma Jeane born
Norma Jeane Mortenson is born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. She grows up without a father figure in a family shadowed by mental illness.
Her mother, Gladys Monroe, is twice interned in psychiatric facilities. During those periods Norma Jeane is sent to foster homes.
Gladys, a film editor, also regularly leaves her daughter in movie theatres while she goes to work.
Later, Monroe recalls sitting transfixed for hours and falling in love with, among others, Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s first “blonde bombshell”.
She takes the name Baker, which is the surname of her mother’s first husband.
1942: Young bride
At 16, she marries Jim Dougherty, a neighbour, to avoid being sent to another foster home. The following year Dougherty leaves to join the navy and Norma Jeane goes to work in a munitions factory.
1946: Call me Marilyn
At the factory she is spotted by a photographer and begins modelling. She divorces Dougherty and clinches her first studio contract with 20th Century Fox, changing her name to Marilyn Monroe.
1952: ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’
Six years later she stars in the Howard Hawks comedy classic that will become one of her most famous films. She protests the disparity of pay between her salary (US$18,000) and the one received by her co-star Jane Russell (US$40,000).
1954: Joe DiMaggio
Monroe’s second marriage on January 14 is to ex-baseball superstar Jo DiMaggio. The union lasts nine months but they remain friends for life.
Monroe stars that year in Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch that includes one of cinemas most iconic scenes involving the whoosh of air from an underground subway, whipping up Monroe’s fulsome white dress.
1955: Lee Strasberg school
She joins the renowned Lee Strasberg school of acting. Later the master teacher says of all his talented and famous pupils just two stood out from the rest: Marlon Brando and Marilyn.
1956: Marries Arthur Miller
On June 29 she marries celebrated writer and Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, whom she met a year earlier at acting school, beginning a tumultuous relationship that lasts five years.
1958: ‘Some Like it Hot’
Another of Monroe’s most famous films but the shoot in California is notoriously difficult. By now Marilyn is battling addiction, is frequently late and struggles with her lines.
The cross-dressing caper, nominated for six Oscars and winning one, is now often cited as among the best films ever made and influenced later hits from Tootsie to Mrs Doubtfire.
1961: Troubled mind
Monroe and Miller divorce in Mexico on January 20. During the marriage, she has at least two miscarriages and makes several suicide attempts. She is twice admitted to hospitals for psychiatric observation.
1962: Mysterious death
In January 1962, she makes one of her most famous public appearances, singing “Happy Birthday Mr President” to John F. Kennedy.
To do so she abandons midway the film shoot of George Cukor’s Something’s Got to Give. When she returns 12 days later the film is cancelled and Fox fires her.
Monroe is discovered dead in her bed in her Los Angeles home in the early hours of August 5, 1962 in circumstances that remain murky. She is 36.
The coroner calls her death a “probable suicide” from an overdose of sleeping pills but to this day the death of one of Hollywood’s greatest stars remains shrouded in mystery. — AFP
