Marilyn Monroe

Her mother cut film negatives at a Hollywood lab and named on the birth certificate a husband she had left before the pregnancy began. A DNA comparison in 2022 identified the father as Charles Stanley Gifford, Gladys Baker's supervisor at RKO. Gladys broke down in January 1934, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent the rest of her life going in and out of hospitals. Norma Jeane Mortenson became a ward of the state at seven. She went into the Los Angeles Orphans Home in September 1935 and came out at eleven, then moved among relatives and friends of her guardian, Grace Goddard. She developed a stutter. At sixteen, on June 19, 1942, she married a factory worker named James Dougherty.

A photographer named David Conover found her at the Radioplane munitions plant in late 1944. She signed with the Blue Book agency in August 1945, straightened and bleached her hair, and took a new name in 1946. Fox signed her that August and dropped her a year later. Columbia dropped her in 1948. Fox took her back in December 1950, and 1953 settled the question: Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire. Then she stopped working. Suspended in January 1954 for refusing another musical, she went east, founded Marilyn Monroe Productions with the photographer Milton Greene, and fought the studio for a year while the press laughed at her. She came back with 400,000 dollars for four pictures and the right to choose her own directors and cinematographers.

The publicity department stood her on a subway grate on Lexington Avenue for several hours in front of nearly 2,000 people, and her marriage to Joe DiMaggio — jealous, controlling and physically abusive — ended within weeks. She filed after nine months. An ectopic pregnancy in 1957 and a miscarriage the next year were most likely tied to her endometriosis. She overdosed on barbiturates more than once. In 1961 she was admitted to the Payne Whitney clinic in New York, put by mistake on a ward for psychosis and locked in a padded cell for three days, until DiMaggio got her moved. In 1962, sick with sinusitis on Something's Got to Give, Fox told reporters she was faking, fired her on June 7 and sued her for 750,000 dollars.

Her housekeeper saw light under the bedroom door at three in the morning on August 5, 1962, and got no answer. Her psychiatrist broke a window. Toxicology found acute barbiturate poisoning at several times a lethal dose, and the coroner recorded a probable suicide. DiMaggio arranged the funeral at Westwood Village on August 8 and kept most of Hollywood out. Norman Mailer's 1973 book pushed murder theories into the mainstream, and a 1982 district attorney's investigation found nothing. Critics have never agreed about the work — insubstantial to David Thomson, quietly subversive to Jonathan Rosenbaum. Los Angeles made her last house a monument in 2024, and her letters were auctioned in June 2026, on her 100th birthday.

Marilyn Monroe's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Niagara film
  The film noir that turned her from a starlet into a lead 1953
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes film
  One of three releases in the year that made her 1953
• The Seven Year Itch film
  The subway grate publicity stunt came with it 1955
• Marilyn Monroe Productions company
  Founded with Milton Greene and later called instrumental in the fall of the studio system 1955
• Bus Stop film
  Made with her as head of MMP and technically in charge on location 1956
• Some Like It Hot film
  It won her a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy 1959

• January 1934 aged 7 Her mother is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and committed Monroe became a ward of the state at seven.
• September 1935 aged 9 Placed in the Los Angeles Orphans Home She stayed until the summer of 1937, when she was eleven.
• June 19, 1942 aged 16 Marries James Dougherty at sixteen
• August 1945 aged 19 Signs with the Blue Book Model Agency She was found at a munitions plant the previous winter.
• March 1952 aged 25 Gets ahead of a scandal by admitting she posed nude in 1949 She said she had been broke. The strategy worked.
• January 14, 1954 aged 27 Marries Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco City Hall She filed for divorce nine months later.
• November 1954 aged 28 Walks out on Fox and founds Marilyn Monroe Productions A year-long legal fight with the studio followed.
• June 29, 1956 aged 30 Marries Arthur Miller, who had been subpoenaed by HUAC The studio urged her to drop him. She refused.
• August 4, 1962 aged 36 Dies at her Brentwood house of acute barbiturate poisoning Fox had fired her and sued her for 750,000 dollars eight weeks earlier.

• Joe DiMaggio 1914–1999
  Yankees center fielder whose hitting streak and celebrity made him an enduring symbol of mid-century America. married to
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. married to
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. wrote the book that started the theories
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. made her a silkscreen
• Gloria Steinem b. 1934
  Writer and organizer who became one of the most visible leaders of second-wave feminism. argued about her afterward