Marilyn Monroe

From Some Like It Hot to The Misfits (and with a Millionaire in between), here's a look at Marilyn Monroe's accomplished onscreen legacy.

The performances in this countdown showcase her unforgettable work as a dynamic leading lady. While some consider Monroe to be synonymous with a life of scandal, and others see her simply as a bubble-headed sex symbol, this list forcefully counters those misconceptions. As an actor, Marilyn Monroe embodied glamour, tragedy, romanticism, and wit.

Andrew Dominik's 'Blonde' has generated plenty of controversy for its depiction of violence towards Marilyn Monroe. But could the icon's complicated story ...

Near the end of Blonde, a drugged and drunken Marilyn collapses on the floor of a plane flying her to give the President of the United States a blow job, keening and rolling on the ground. But perhaps what we mean by it’s so sad is that we see in women like Blonde’s Marilyn the futility of living so close to life’s marrow, so perpetually in tune with the deep down thrum. And while our feelings about Marilyn Monroe still run hot decades after her death, this fascination may be in part due to our uneasy relationship with the display of female pain among the living. Our enduring fascination with Marilyn points to something darker in the ether; something darker in ourselves. We see this in Blonde when Marilyn, awash in bouquets and fan letters, is being zipped into her undergarments by attendants while confessing that she feels like “a slave to Marilyn Monroe” and is exhausted by life as a caricature. “Every one of us, everybody in the world, would give their right arm to be you.” Only the visible is allowed to be real for a beautiful movie star. This first manifestation of her grief — to make herself beautiful, to make herself sexy — was the most socially acceptable one she could have chosen. The story of beauty is hagiography, while the story of glamour is riveting. When Marilyn slipped into a tight sweater, glued false lashes onto her eyelids, and parlayed the stammer she’d developed after being molested as an 8-year-old into a breathy aural suggestion of sex, she was looking for a daddy, as she would call all of her future lovers: a father figure who would never abandon her as her own father had. She was the aestheticization of female pain embodied, and this is central to [our enduring fascination with her](https://www.thecut.com/2022/09/leave-marilyn-monroe-alone.html) almost 60 years after her death. To use it as fuel to become what the world wanted from a woman — a pliant pinup willing to smile, at least for a little while, in obscenity’s face. Marilyn was about something that had already begun to fall out of favor in the mid-20th century and has continued declining in popularity ever since, which is the idea of a woman needing a man to love her.

As one of Hollywood's sex symbols, it's not difficult to imagine the horrors and trauma that Norma Jeane Mortenson might have faced as an actor finding her way ...

Considering that Marilyn Monroe is one of the most celebrated and beloved actresses of her time, there is never a single moment in this movie (that follows her through the height of her career) when she feels triumphant. As a woman watching this and as a lover of Marilyn Monroe, this felt like torture. None of the people in her life — except for maybe her makeup artist Whitey, aka Allan Snyder (Toby Huss) — is there to comfort her or help her or love her. Men want to possess her or fix her or hurt her, women want to hate her and shame her. De Armas is a duplicate of Monroe in some scenes, with it nearly being impossible to tell the difference between her and the real Monroe. She's crying for the entire movie, and you want to cry with her for the way they're butchering Monroe's legacy. Monroe is perpetually surrounded by men; the only women in her life abandon her or make fun of her. However, it is marketed as a historical film, and it's not really emphasized to its audience that it's based on a fictional story about Monroe by Joyce Carol Oates. The fact that those moments feel so genuine makes it even more painful that the movie doesn't linger in them and instead chooses to shock and sensationalize. Chayze Irvin's camera work is often dreamlike and the constantly shifting perspectives, aspect ratios, and jumping between black and white and color adds to the chaotic nature of the story. If you ever wanted a lesson in what the male gaze looks like, this movie is the prime example. [Blonde](https://collider.com/tag/blonde/) portrays [Marilyn Monroe](https://collider.com/tag/marilyn-monroe/) as a lifelong victim.

Blonde writer, director Andrew Dominik's doesn't understand subject Marilyn Monroe, his disinterest in her can be felt throughout the film as he shows lack ...

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Netflix biopic of Marilyn Monroe tries to do too much with the iconic star. Read our review of Blonde.

Meanwhile, his script truly hammers home the notion that “Marilyn Monroe” was a construct that just happened to share the same body as Norma Jeane. True, her accent wavers a little in a few scenes. Blonde opens with an extended sequence set in 1933 Los Angeles, in which a young Norma Jeane (Monroe’s birth name) is almost killed in the bathtub by her mom. That’s the same length as writer/director Andrew Dominik’s version, which was released last week in select cinemas before coming to Netflix. Blonde is an adaptation of a novel by Joyce Carol Oates that was already a heavily fictionalized version of the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. Article content

Qu'est-ce qu'on peut bien dire de nouveau sur Elvis Presley et Marilyn Monroe ? Il me semble qu'on n'en finit plus de tirer le jus de ces deux icônes de la ...

Une première version de ce texte attribuait la toile Boulevard of Broken Dreams, avec Elvis et Marilyn Monroe notamment, à Edward Hopper. Pendant presque trois heures, la caméra ne lâche pas le visage d’Ana de Armas (excellente dans son incarnation de Monroe), qui n’est que souffrance. La mère folle, le père absent, le viol par un producteur, les coups de Joe DiMaggio quand ils étaient mariés, une fellation imposée par le président Kennedy (en gros plan), une discussion avec son fœtus, des scènes de vomi (qu’on reçoit sur la gueule), la foule des admirateurs transformés littéralement en monstres, jusqu’à une scène d’avortement où on voit un speculum entrer dans son vagin… Mais j’ai retrouvé de l’estime pour l’artiste par mes groupes punk à l’adolescence, qui reconnaissaient l’apport du jeune Elvis et vomissaient celui de Las Vegas, l’accusant presque d’avoir tué le rock’n’roll. À ma grande surprise, Luhrmann m’a un peu réconciliée avec le Elvis des derniers jours, celui du clinquant de Las Vegas et des costumes avec cape. Qu’est-ce qu’on peut bien dire de nouveau sur Elvis Presley et Marilyn Monroe ?

With Ana de Armas playing Marilyn Monroe in 'Blonde' hitting Netflix today, we're ranking every actress who has played the star onscreen from Michelle ...

The movie is based on the memoir by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young third AD on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, the less iconic comedy starring Sir Laurence Olivier as the eponymous prince who falls in love with Monroe’s showgirl. Here, Monroe is covered up (literally) and spoken over (literally) because the story is never really about her; it’s about the boys obsessed with her as the ultimate goal. Much importance is given to the push-and-pull relationship between Marilyn and her mother, Gladys (Susan Sarandon) — far more than her marriages or affair with JFK, which sets this biopic apart from the others. In a remote castle populated by celebrity impersonators, Marilyn lives with her husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), and their daughter, Shirley Temple (Esmé Creed-Miles). The entire premise of the short-lived Smash is the impossibility of a single performer fully capturing that indescribable thing that made Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe. The resulting film (which garnered a sequel, Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn) is much more about men staring at the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson than about the person herself. Monroe’s purported affair with the Kennedys is the least interesting thing about her (and them). Positioned as her one true love, the one who got away, and even a secret fourth husband, this is possibly the most offensive entry in the “mediocre man somehow charms Monroe” subgenre. In a series criticized for taking liberties with historical facts, it’s not surprising there is little respect paid to the memory of Monroe (she has to mock-blow Bobby Kennedy), who’s presented here as little more than a crass, unstable bimbo. Barbara Niven (a Lifetime-movie staple) plays a cartoon version of Monroe: boobs out, big blonde wig, and desperate to get in bed with JFK. A lot of these are told from the point of view of the men who took advantage of her or pined for her from afar, so much so that there’s a whole genre of “Marilyn and me” stories that lean heavily toward the “and me” part. That’s not counting the myriad of cameos (she pops up in the background of a “supposedly dead celebrity” party of immortals in Death Becomes Her), allusions (Penélope Cruz in Broken Embraces dons a Marilyn-esque wig) and stories loosely inspired by her story (the Paddy Chayefsky-penned 1958 film The Goddess is widely assumed to be based on Monroe).

"Blonde" Makeup and hair crew on how they transformed Ana de Armas into Marilyn Monroe.

“The gray is painted into their hair to make them more distinguished.” She adds, “There are silvery streaks painted in, and when you look at the original, you think, ‘Why would they do that?’ So we had to copy that.” In recreating “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Kerwin mixed a fuchsia lip with red. Says Kerwin, “We needed something sturdy that could hold up with the gluing and ungluing of wigs.” “It changed the eye shape,” Kerwin explains. It gave us a chance to figure out what worked better in black and white as opposed to color,” explains Kerwin. The shoot session was done before principal filming began, and it helped immensely since they would have to recreate many of Monroe’s most iconic moments.

She was an actress of uncommon talent. But once again a director is more interested in examining her body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her ...

Monroe’s life was tough, but there was more to it than Dominik grasps, the proof of which is in the films she left behind — “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Misfits” — the whole damn filmography. But by so insistently erasing the divide between these realms, Dominik ends up reducing Marilyn to the very image — the goddess, the sexpot, the pinup, the commodity — that he also seems to be trying to critique. Dominik does get around to showing her face, which is beaming as the camera points up toward Marilyn in outward supplication. The movie opens with a short black-and-white sequence that re-creates the night Monroe filmed the most famous scene in Billy Wilder’s garish 1955 comedy, “The Seven Year Itch,” about a married man lusting after a neighbor played by Monroe. In the introduction to the book, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A woman, Showalter later adds without much conviction, “who was much more than a victim.” His Norma Jeane — and her glamorous, vexed creation, Marilyn Monroe — is almost nothing more than a victim: As the years passed and even as her fame grows, she is mistreated again and again, even by those who claim to love her. Watching “Blonde,” I wondered if Dominik had ever actually watched a Marilyn Monroe film, had seen the transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace? But of course this is all about Monroe, one of the most famous women of the 20th century, and it revisits her fame and life — Bobby Cannavale plays a character based on Joe DiMaggio, and Adrien Brody on Arthur Miller — with enough fidelity to suggest that Dominik is working in good faith when he’s simply exploiting her anew. “Blonde” doesn’t announce itself as fiction right off, though it carries the usual mealy-mouthed disclaimer in the credits. (As Anthony Summers points out in his book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” [she formed her own corporation: Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.) Mostly, what’s missing is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius. After a brief prelude that introduces Marilyn at the height of her fame, the movie rewinds to the sad, lonely little girl named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson).

Filmmaker Andrew Dominik has called Blonde “a movie for all the unloved children of the world.” Here's the real story of Monroe's family life.

I did this at sixteen by getting married.” (Monroe’s only guardian in the film is a neighbor who appears briefly, played by Sara Paxton.) When McKee Goddard and her husband [announced their move](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/leaming-marilyn.html?scp=62&sq=orphan%2520train&st=cse) to West Virginia they offered a then 15-year-old Monroe the choice between marrying James Dougherty, the 21-year-old son of a former neighbor, or returning to the orphanage. [spent her childhood](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/marilyn-monroe-career-timeline/62/) in various orphanages and foster homes, where she allegedly faced [sexual abuse](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/11/marilyn-monroe-201011) and emotional distress. When her daughter was three years old, Gladys would [allegedly](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Secret_Life_of_Marilyn_Monroe/MlkKQf4Mt00C?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Ida) make a thwarted attempt to break into Monroe’s foster home, placing her daughter in a duffel bag and briefly locking out the foster mother. “I used to tell lies in my interviews—chiefly about my mother and father,” Monroe wrote in My Story. [two weeks old](https://www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-mother-relationship) when Gladys first dropped her off at a foster home in Hawthorne, California. As the mother of two children—Jackie and Berniece—who had already been taken from her by an ex-husband, Gladys was eager to keep her youngest in her life in some form, according to [Biography](https://www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-mother-relationship). [RKO film cutter](https://time.com/6215916/blonde-true-story-marilyn-monroe-netflix/)). Based on the [2000 Pulitzer Prize–shortlisted novel](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/04/back-to-blonde) by Joyce Carol Oates, he has [called](https://collider.com/blonde-ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-andrew-dominik-comments/) Blonde “a movie for all the unloved children of the world.” She is shown directly threatening her daughter’s life multiple times— nearly drowning her in a bathtub and driving her toward the 1933 Griffith Park fire. “It wasn’t till later that I realized how much she had done for me,” Monroe wrote of her “Aunt Grace” in her posthumously published memoir, [My Story](https://www.google.com/books/edition/My_Story/VbOIqnTRumIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=arranged). “Every baby needs a da-da-daddy,” Marilyn Monroe sings in one of her first credited roles, as former burlesque dancer Peggy Martin in 1948’s Ladies of the Chorus. At the film’s beginning, a seven-year-old Norma Jeane Baker (Lily Fisher) is tormented by her alcoholic and mentally unstable mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson).

Did Monroe have an affair with JFK? Was she abused by Joe DiMaggio? Was she in a throuple?

But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that,” Roberts recalled. What seems highly dubious is that Monroe would let Kennedy treat her as dismissively as is suggested by Blonde, even though the womanizing president was notoriously not a romantic when it came to his conquests. Z,” a meeting that might be her big break if it results in a contract with “the studio.” Instead of an audition, she finds she is expected to perform fellatio on him. After treating her with as much respect and affection as he would a sex doll with no needs or personality of her own, he turns his back and the agents hustle her out—all wham, bam, with not even a thank you, ma’am. Baker had a mental breakdown in January 1934 and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, after which she was in and out of institutions for the rest of her life. Blonde depicts (in gory detail) Marilyn having an abortion after her breakup with the two Juniors, although whether this was her decision and arose, as the film suggests, out of her fear that her mother’s mental instability could be hereditary or whether the studio arranged it so she could start shooting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on schedule is left ambiguous. “ [An actress isn’t a machine](https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/a28305/marilyn-monroe-career-woman/#:~:text=An%20actress%20isn%27t%20a%20machine%2C%20but%20they%20treat%20you,contract%20with%20Twentieth%20Century%20Fox.),” she told Life magazine, “but they treat you like one.” After Gentlemen Prefer Blondes proved to be Fox’s highest-earning film to date, Monroe expected to be able to command roles that showed off her range as an actress. The result was an estrangement between us, and I have not seen her for several years.” [By some accounts](https://people.com/movies/marilyn-monroes-most-famous-lovers-truth-vs-rumor/), it was not Monroe’s stepping out with movie stars for publicity that broke up the relationship, but Chaplin discovering her in bed with his brother Sydney. DiMaggio, 12 years older than Monroe, tried to control her career, discouraging her from taking roles that reinforced the sexualized blond-bombshell image she was best known for and encouraging her to become a full-time housewife. [Blonde](https://slate.com/culture/2022/09/blonde-marilyn-monroe-netflix-movie-ana-de-armas.html) is not so much a biopic based on the facts of the late Hollywood icon’s life as a speculative dive into her psyche, very much in the vein of [Spencer](https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/spencer-kristen-stewart-princess-diana-movie-accuracy.html), Pablo Larraín’s tribute to another iconic blond, Princess Diana. Gladys’ behavior grows increasingly erratic, including putting Norma Jeane in a car and driving toward a wildfire dressed only in a nightgown, until finally she tries to drown the child in the bathtub, after which she is committed to a state institution for the hospitalization of the mentally ill. was the same age as I, 21, an attractive, petite, unknown movie actress named Norma Jean Dougherty who was under contract at Twentieth Century-Fox.” However, Chaplin went on to recall, “from a professional point of view it was absolutely necessary for her to be seen together with all kinds of movie stars to get the papers interested in giving her a mention.

From her fight for pay parity on 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' to troubles on the set of 'Some Like It Hot.'

[her final interview](https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/14/greatinterviews), Monroe would recount a similar story: “I remember when I got the part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. One of Blonde’s only moments of levity comes when Monroe is offered $500 a week to star in 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while her costar Jane Russell is paid $100,000 because she’s on loan from another studio. That contract was [reportedly](https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/inside-marilyn-monroes-twisted-toxic-relationships/) not extended after Monroe allegedly refused sex with studio president Harry Cohn in his office. At the start of her career in show-biz, Blonde’s Monroe is raped by a man referred to as “Mr. Later in the film, when Monroe is asked by Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) how she got her start in movies, she appears disturbed and flashbacks of the assault play in her head. [per](https://nypost.com/2018/08/11/inside-marilyn-monroes-twisted-toxic-relationships/) biographer Charles Casillo, she had an arrangement with film executive Joe Schenck, in which she would “service” him for career advancement, including a six-month deal with Columbia Pictures. He gave me a script to read and told me how to pose while reading it. “He had a bug up his ass about not absolutely giving her the right parts. But how many of the show-biz stories in Dominik’s Blonde are true to how they really went down? She was not respected within the industry. Below, a breakdown of the filmmaking fact vs. Viewers are offered snippets of Monroe’s career—her first major performance as a deranged babysitter in 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock, her fight for pay parity ahead of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and turbulent days on 1959’s Some Like It Hot.

Netflix's Blonde has renewed interest in the actress' short but memorable life. The actress appeared in Gentelmen Prefer Blondes and other classic movies.

Found on a table in her home was a letter from the creator of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, who wanted her for the lead in a new musical. Her psychiatrist called the doctor who actually prescribed Monroe the sleeping pills, who then came and pronounced Monroe dead when he arrived. She then married playwright Arthur Miller (best known for "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible"), but she divorced him in 1961. In 2000, Joyce Carol Oates published a fictionalized version of Monroe's life in Blonde, which Netflix adapted into a feature film of the same name starring Ana de Armas. For model and actress Marilyn Monroe—the subject of a new fictionalized move on her life, Blonde—her personal life pervaded through her professional career. Monroe's mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and financial hardship and her father was out of the picture, so she shuffled between foster homes and guardians until she married a 21-year-old named Jim Dougherty at age 16.

The life of Marilyn Monroe is one of Hollywood's most enduring, intriguing and ultimately tragic stories, and it serves as the basis for Netflix's film ...

Illustrated with rare photos of Marilyn throughout her life, My Story tells the real story of how Marilyn became the American Hollywood icon the world knows and loves today. [National Suicide Prevention Lifeline](https://988lifeline.org/) at [988](tel:18002738255) or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. She said life wasn’t worth living anymore.” Love letters and phone calls to the president were going unanswered and her affairs with both Jack and Bobby were considered a liability for the Whitehouse and both men distanced themselves from Monroe–rejection and loneliness hit her hard. Written in her own words, My Story takes readers through Marilyn’s life, from her childhood as an unwanted orphan to her rise as a movie star and sex symbol. For the next 20 years, he had six roses delivered to Monroe’s crypt in the Corridor of Memories three times a week. Monroe believed it was to help her withdraw from alcohol and sleeping pills, but she quickly learned it was because she was deemed “self-destructive” and placed in a straitjacket to sit in a maximum-security ward. Lawford told detectives that he later regretted not checking in on her later in the evening. “She talked about being a waif, that she was ugly, that people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She contacted her ex-husband, baseball god John DiMaggio, who got Monroe moved to another hospital where she was treated as a regular patient and her detox from alcohol and drugs could begin. She was one of the world’s first true “sex symbols”, becoming an icon for a time of sexual revolution between the 1950s and 60s. At 3.50 am, Monroe’s doctor arrived and pronounced her dead at the scene. Ralph Greenson, who broke into Monroe’s bedroom through the window and found the star unresponsive in her bed.

Rooted in reality, Blonde wallows in the most tragic aspects of Marilyn Monroe's life—but plenty of what occurs in the film starring Ana de Armas didn't ...

[Bobby Cannavale](https://www.eonline.com/news/bobby_cannavale)) some compromising photos of her, after which he returns home and smacks her in the face. But the set issues were real, and the star had a miscarriage toward the end of filming. Monroe informed the woman calling that she had never met the man in question and he was free to contact her lawyer. Real life: Norma and her mother lived with Albert and Ida Bolender, the couple who took her in as an infant, for almost seven years, which allowed Baker the freedom to be able to work and save some money. When she gets pregnant again during her marriage to Miller, her guilt manifests in a heartbreaking conversation she has with her fetus. The child runs to the neighbors' apartment, her mother is taken away to a mental hospital, and Norma is soon dropped off at an orphanage. That relationship was over by Christmas, and the following June, Baker placed her days-old daughter in the care of neighbors and returned to work. In early 1962, Monroe got a call from a nurse who told her that her father had suffered a heart attack and really wanted to see her. (Mortensen and Baker divorced in 1928 and he died in a car crash the following year.) When Monroe came back to the car, Skolsky recalled, she told him her "son-of-a-bitch" father had said to her, "Listen, Marilyn, I'm married, I have children. Finding out that one of her so-called best friends was sending the letters all along is a final blow as her life skids to its premature end on Aug. She's grappling with, and we're grappling with, the image of her life."

In contrast to the helpless depiction of Marilyn Monroe in Netflix's 'Blonde,' the real star seized her own power and broke barriers by founding her own ...

And Monroe's founding of her own production company was considered a major blow to the studio system as it once was. She loved acting, she loved her work and she wanted to be able to take on roles and work in a way that wasn't demeaning and degrading. "She would have had confidence in her own opinions, and that would have grown and solidified. This was her way to be able to be the type of actress she knew she could be, and always wanted to be. It's easier for people to take a look at the cartoon version, and say, 'Okay, I understand what that is,' than it is for them to open themselves up to the possibility of nuance. Within the next several years, the studios would continue to decline, clearing the path for the "New Hollywood" of the 1960s. The papers heralded Monroe's new contract and victory in her legal battle as a historic moment. "The studio owned her, and she knew that she couldn't remain in that system, but she also didn't want to give up acting. She grit her teeth through the making of River of No Return at Fox, commenting, "I think I deserve a better deal than a grade-Z cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery." Monroe was company president, with Greene as vice president (she took 51 percent of the company and Greene 49 percent). She also dealt a grievous blow to the Hollywood studio system in the process. Monroe gets the latter treatment in the latest film to tackle her life, [Andrew Dominik's](http://www.ew.com/people/andrew-dominik) [Blonde](http://www.ew.com/creative-work/blonde).

The “behind the scenes footage” of the current moment is Blonde, the new Andrew Dominik movie starring Ana de Armas, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates.

Marilyn’s longtime makeup artist, Whitey Snyder, tended to say the same thing about the establishment of the iconic Marilyn look: that it was a collaboration, and that Marilyn was intimately involved. Marilyn even talked about her own sex appeal in the way an artist might, with detachment and a close attention to the ironic effect she wanted to achieve. What happens if we imagine a Marilyn Monroe who was the author of her own persona? In her version of events, the choice is a collaboration. In The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Churchwell argues that in the end, all the Marilyn Monroe stories come down to dead bodies. We meet Norma Jeane first as a child and then as a young actress on the come-up, and pause only to depict her rape by the head of the studio who gives her her first break. Always, though, in Blonde, creating Marilyn is a torment and a torture: She must be summoned out of the mirror laboriously, moment by moment, like a demon being conjured. In fact, “the writing about Marilyn in the 1950s,” remarks Churchwell in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, “insists with such obsessive redundance upon her naturalness that it seems to be trying to persuade itself of something it is afraid isn’t true at all.” Sometimes, “Marilyn” appears to emerge out of Norma Jeane as a trauma response: “Marilyn” is the reaction the camera has to Norma Jeane’s pain, panic, and dissociation. Yet so focused is Blonde on her miseries that it feels more as though Marilyn is being punished by the sadistic eye of the camera, which called her back to life for the sole purpose of reveling in her miseries. Even as the culture at large celebrated Marilyn for her easy, organic sexiness, it also turned a suspicious eye to the question of just how natural it might be. In a cultural moment obsessed with sex and how women have it, Marilyn Monroe was the woman of the moment.

Netflix has finally released its controversial Marilyn Monroe drama Blonde – but some viewers have complained that the film is “unwatchable”.

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While some reviews have praised Blonde as a feminist reimagining of Marilyn Monroe's life — including Oates herself — others say it perpetuates the very ...

So the fact that she is a victim of her own fame needs to be questioned." Monroe started her own independent production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, in the mid-1950s. "A lot of magazine stories talked about early suicide attempts, or miscarriages, or her difficult relationship with her mother. "I've never made a film that tells me more about the viewer than this one." Dominik, who told the Associated Press that people "like to be offended" (isn't that what he wanted?) said the film is not exploitative. "So I selected every image of Marilyn I could find and then tried to stage scenes around those images."

Netflix's Blonde biopic starring Ana de Armas takes liberties with the truth and overlooks crucial aspects from Marilyn Monroe's life.

Monroe knew she had power in her fame, and her decision set the wheels in motion for the end of the studio system in 1954. Instead, the filmmakers seem set on telling the story of a woman responsible for her own mental deterioration, isolation and objectification. One of the most damning elements of Blonde is its use of pregnancy as a way to define and punish its protagonist. She has no one to trust and the people who keep her company ultimately hurt, betray and damage her. Monroe was an isolated figure, but she had people she loved and who loved her in return. In reality, Monroe was acutely aware of the perception of her and how, where possible, she could fight it. While these things are considered true, it’s not clear how many times or by who she became pregnant, and her inability to sustain a pregnancy is considered a core reason why her mental health deteriorated. [Blonde](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/jfk-scene-blonde-netlfix) is the latest in a string of stories to hit the public realm, and between documentaries, podcasts and dramatic portrayals, seemingly no stone has been allowed to remain unturned about the minutiae of a life tragically cut short. While it’s true female stars in Hollywood’s exploitative 20th-century studio system had little say in their careers, Monroe fought for her worth as an actress and financial asset. In a brutal, almost three-hour-long journey through Monroe’s life, [Ana de Armas](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/ana-de-armas-marilyn-monroe-ghost-blonde) plays a version of the troubled star that’s moulded by trauma. A previous 2001 adaptation tells viewers that what they’re about to watch is fiction, but [Andrew Dominik](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/netflix-blonde-marilyn-monroe)’s latest version, crucially, does not. [Netflix](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/best-netflix-series-uk)’s already highly divisive Marilyn Monroe biopic [Blonde](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/blonde-netflix-review-marilyn-monroe), questions are being raised about what is fact and fiction in the film's portrayal of the woman born Norma Jean Mortenson.

If Netflix's latest about the blonde bombshell leaves you eager for more Monroe, here's where to start your own exploration.

In order to escape, she would act increasingly erratic, telling staff, “If you’re going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut,” as Monroe wrote to Dr. [admitted](https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/11/marilyn-monroe-201011) to Payne Whitney’s psychiatric ward, where she would be held in a locked and padded room for three days. After bit parts in rowdy comedies (Ladies of the Chorus, Love Happy) and an Oscar-winning drama (All About Eve), Monroe’s first star-making turn would arrive with this 1952 psychological noir, scenes of which are prominently replicated in Blonde.

Spoiler alert! The following contains important plot points of Marilyn Monroe drama "Blonde" (now streaming on Netflix). If you're anything like us, ...

"The vile sex scene between Marilyn and JFK is definitely fiction," Fortner says. "Blonde" depicts a horrendous and degrading relationship between Marilyn and President John F. She would go and call her father in a phone booth, and then come back in tears saying that the guy refused to meet her." In one scene, "Blonde" shows Marilyn's second husband, New York Yankees player Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), berating Marilyn when she gets home, before beating her offscreen. "There was a short period of time when Marilyn lived with her mother when she was young. There, in a drug- and booze-filled haze, the president forces her to perform oral sex before raping her. "There are many, many (instances) that were described in her actual life of her getting a driver out to some town in California. In the movie, before Marilyn signs on to 1953's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," she questions why she's only being offered $5,000 compared to her co-star Jane Russell's $100,000 salary. "She knew she was becoming more popular among moviegoers and more famous. The film is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 historical fiction novel, which traces her humble beginnings as Norma Jeane Baker to her fame, and how she became a victim of a leering, male-dominated industry. (Evan Williams) in an acting class, and they go home together to have a threesome. Here’s some of what's fact and fiction in the

Blonde” pretends to imagine how Monroe would have felt about her pregnancies. Instead, it jarringly shoves a C.G.I. fetus into her midcentury mind.