biography
| name: |
Monroe, Marilyn
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stage name of Norma Jean Mortenson or Baker
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| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1926–62)
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| biography:
| Film actress, born in Los Angeles, California, USA. For most of her childhood and teenage 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 aeroplane 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 films. 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 films, 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 gave two of her more sophisticated performances in Bus Stop (1956) and Some Like It Hot (1959). She was married to the playwright Arthur Miller (1956–61) and starred in a film he wrote for her, The Misfits (1961). But her life continued in its roller-coaster fashion, and she was briefly hospitalized in a mental clinic; she was dropped from a film for failure to show up on time and she began 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. |
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