{"id":705844,"date":"2026-05-31T13:17:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T13:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/705844\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T13:17:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T13:17:08","slug":"one-hundred-years-of-marilyn-monroe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/705844\/","title":{"rendered":"One hundred years of Marilyn Monroe"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The exhibition Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon opens at Los Angeles\u2019s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on May 31.Emily Shur\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The build-up to Marilyn Monroe\u2019s 100th birthday on June 1 has become so sprawling, lucrative and psychologically loaded it could justify a constellation of university courses. <\/p>\n

Marketing students, for instance, could analyze the money machine behind Monroe. As one of the only movie stars of her time to attempt financial autonomy outside of the studio system \u2013 launching her own production company in 1955, decades before such moves became common \u2013 Hollywood undervalued her star power. While Cary Grant earned up to US$3-million a film and Elizabeth Taylor took home US$1 million for Cleopatra, Monroe was still perceived by film execs as a mere sex symbol and made barely US$100,000 per blockbuster for much of her career.<\/p>\n

Yet Monroe\u2019s fiscal afterlife is seemingly limitless. Authentic Brands Group \u2013 the global brand management company founded by Canadian Jamie Salter \u2013 acquired Monroe\u2019s name and likeness in 2011, allowing licensing and branding partnerships to continue long after her death. In 2024, the company received major backlash for allowing tech firm Soul Machines to create \u201cDigital Marilyn,\u201d an AI-generated chatbot that recreated the actor\u2019s voice and mannerisms. Another recent controversy involved the attempted sale by California auction house Julien\u2019s Auctions of Monroe\u2019s medical X-rays (since removed from the site after much online protest).<\/p>\n

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Marilyn Monroe\u2019s 100th birthday is on June 1.Sam Shaw\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Literary scholars, too, have no shortage of material to chew on. In June alone, a mini publishing industry will emerge around the star\u2019s centenary, with new releases revisiting nearly every corner of her mythology: her life in The Marilyn Monroe Century: From Norma Jeane to Icon; her death in The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe; her reading list in Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe; her relationship with fashion in Jean Louis: Hollywood\u2019s Bombshell Designer; and her film career in Marilyn Monroe 100: The Official Centenary Book. <\/p>\n

Even children are being folded into the Monroe economy with Style Icons: Marilyn Monroe, a softcover aimed at readers under 10. But the volume receiving more attention than the rest is Marilyn: The Lost Photographs, the Last Interview, featuring photographer Allan Grant\u2019s final images of the star and an unpublished transcript of what is claimed to be her last recorded conversation with Life magazine\u2019s Richard Meryman.<\/p>\n

Monroe\u2019s richest archive, however, belongs to film, fashion and music. Across 29 movies, she created a visual vocabulary that continues to fuel both high and low culture. The impact of her image is now being explored in a quartet of major exhibitions. The largest, Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, opens at Los Angeles\u2019s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on May 31. London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery, Milan\u2019s Mudec and Paris\u2019s La Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise are also staging their own Monroe retrospectives.<\/p>\n

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures curator Simran Bhalla said the exhibition attempts to highlight a quality that\u2019s often overshadowed in conversations about Monroe: her skill in creating a persona.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things we talk about in the exhibition is how Marilyn Monroe really worked collaboratively with costume designers, makeup artists, with directors and screenwriters, to hone her career,\u201d Bhalla said. \u201cPeople are excited to learn about how she was able to seize agency where she could with collaborators to really craft her image.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Marilyn Monroe at a makeup table getting ready for an event in 1955 in New York.Shaw Family Archives\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The show features hundreds of original objects spanning Monroe\u2019s life and career, from her high-school yearbook to furniture from her Brentwood, Los Angeles, home and items from the set of her unfinished final film, Something\u2019s Got to Give. Highlights include two \u201cnude illusion\u201d dresses designed by Orry-Kelly for Some Like It Hot, along with the famous pink gown by costumer William Travilla from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.<\/p>\n

Their presence in the exhibit, Bhalla said, is meant to convey the idea that Monroe possessed a remarkable understanding of how her image functioned culturally. \u201cWe want to emphasize that Marilyn Monroe had an incredible degree of self-awareness. She understood how other people saw her.\u201d<\/p>\n

That self-awareness extended to Monroe\u2019s relationship with sexuality. \u201cShe embraced her sexuality and believed that sex was incredibly natural,\u201d Bhalla said. The show suggests that the clothes she wore in public were carefully curated to reject the status quo. \u201cHer clothes were radical,\u201d Bhalla said, noting that they went against \u201cthe conservative, buttoned-up approach to female sexuality that was prevalent in the 1950s.\u201d<\/p>\n

When CinemaScope technology widened the movie frame in the 1950s, Monroe worked closely with Travilla to shape how her body appeared onscreen, according to Bhalla. The first Canadian film to use CinemaScope was River of No Return, which was shot in Banff, Lake Louise and Jasper National Park in Alberta. Travilla designed dresses that emphasized the film\u2019s tagline: \u201cTwo great natural beauties, Alberta Banff-Jasper and Marilyn Monroe.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Marilyn Monroe\u2019s influence has long inspired other modern icons.Sam Shaw\/Supplied<\/p>\n

\u201cThey both made sure she wasn\u2019t wearing A-lines or any other silhouettes that were unflattering,\u201d Bhalla said, describing the looks in the film as a pre-Spanx \u201cbody-skimming kind of costuming.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to collector and historian Bryan Johns, president and CEO of the Icon Collection \u2013 a private archive of Hollywood costumes \u2013 supplied a large portion of the Academy exhibition, Monroe\u2019s image-making may have been intentional, but it also represented a two-way admiration.<\/p>\n

\u201cWilliam Travilla loved Marilyn and she loved him,\u201d Johns said. \u201cHe saw her as the ideal woman \u2013 someone who combined innocence and sexuality in a way that never felt threatening because together they created something that both women and men loved.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dress remains perhaps the clearest expression of that balancing act. \u201cTravilla managed to cover Marilyn up \u2013 the pink dress showed no cleavage at all \u2013 while still conveying her sensuality, sexuality and power,\u201d Johns said, noting that the look has been copied by everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga to the Kardashians.<\/p>\n

Monroe\u2019s influence has long inspired other modern icons. Debbie Harry, an orphan who fantasized that Monroe was her mother, punkified Monroe\u2019s image with her band, Blondie. Madonna famously recreated Monroe\u2019s Diamonds Are a Girl\u2019s Best Friend performance in Material Girl. Lana Del Rey built much of her melancholic iconography around Monroe\u2019s brand of fateful sensuality in music videos such as Candy Necklace, while Elton John originally wrote Candle in the Wind about the star before later revising it for Princess Diana. <\/p>\n

More recently, Sabrina Carpenter recreated a Monroe image for her Man\u2019s Best Friend album artwork, and Ryan Gosling channelled Diamonds in his pink-suited I\u2019m Just Ken performance at the 2024 Oscars.<\/p>\n

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The exhibition features hundreds of original objects spanning Monroe\u2019s life and career.Emily Shur\/Supplied<\/p>\n

But Monroe\u2019s deepest devotion may come from collectors. One of Canada\u2019s most dedicated connoisseurs is Melinda Mason, who has spent 25 years building an archive of rare ephemera (think airline tickets and Franklin Mint Marilyn dolls).<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s inspired more than a kind of fandom,\u201d Mason said. \u201cThose who love her work and her beauty are what we call the Marilyn community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mason\u2019s first Monroe purchase was a signed 1950 cheque for $146 from the L.A. department store I. Magnin. Her most cherished item remains a pair of rhinestone hair clips Monroe wore in 1954 while attending a production of Macbeth at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Opera House with her husband at the time, Arthur Miller.<\/p>\n

Mason now sees younger women reclaiming the actor. \u201cWith a lot more feminism now, sexuality is a lot more open for these next generations,\u201d Mason said. \u201cThe idea that she is a pioneer is sort of front and centre.\u201d<\/p>\n

She worries about Monroe becoming consumed by spectacle and artificial recreation, particularly with the rise of AI. The flip side, she said, is that more people will learn about Monroe and her influence. <\/p>\n

\u201cI do see that younger people have so much more empathy for her. From what I see online, the way they view what she went through and how she was treated by the studio, the media and her own issues with finding happiness \u2013 it\u2019s really meaningful and relevant to how women are treated today.\u201d <\/p>\n

Johns believes that the tension between persona construction and authenticity is exactly why Monroe has endured. <\/p>\n

\u201cShe has come to represent women\u2019s empowerment in modern culture at a time when we had no language for it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d say that made her too far ahead of her time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The exhibition Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon opens at Los Angeles\u2019s Academy Museum of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":705845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337,2922],"class_list":["post-705844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=705844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/705845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=705844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=705844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=705844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}