Marilyn Monroe at 100

Very excited to share that my essay, Beyond the Blonde, has been published in Encounters with Marilyn Monroe: Celebrating 100 Years.

A hundred years after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains an obsession: endlessly reproduced, discussed, mythologised, rediscovered and reinterpreted. Few screen stars have lingered in the cultural imagination quite like Marilyn, who continues to exist simultaneously as Hollywood legend, fashion icon, tragic figure, comic genius and symbol of modern celebrity. This new collection celebrates that enduring fascination, bringing together essays, interviews, personal reflections, poems, photographs and Marilyn’s own words to explore why her influence still resonates so powerfully today.

Introduced by Lucy Bolton, Encounters with Marilyn Monroe features contributions from more than twenty writers, critics, artists and film lovers, each approaching Marilyn from a different perspective. The result is a wonderfully eclectic and thoughtful portrait of Monroe as star, symbol, icon and radiant cultural force. There are essays exploring her image and mythology, reflections on films and performances, pieces on beauty, celebrity, memory and conspiracy, alongside interviews with people who have spent years researching, preserving and thinking about Monroe’s life and legacy.

My own contribution, Beyond the Blonde, explores Monroe’s intellectual and creative life beyond the clichés that have so often defined her. I look at her love of reading, her studies at the Actors Studio, her determination to be taken seriously as an actress and producer and the tension between the public fantasy of “Marilyn Monroe” and the private woman trying to shape her own identity. There is also, inevitably, discussion of the famous Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn quietly reading Joyce’s Ulysses on a playground bench, an image that says far more about public assumptions than it does about Marilyn herself.

Writing the essay gave me the perfect excuse to revisit films like Bus Stop, The Prince and the Showgirl, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits, all of which reveal just how thoughtful, vulnerable, funny and emotionally intelligent Monroe could be as a performer. The deeper I went, the harder it became to reconcile the real woman with the flattening “dumb blonde” mythology that still lingers around her.

It’s been a real pleasure to contribute to such a lively and wide-ranging collection and to be included alongside so many interesting voices. A hundred years after her birth, Marilyn Monroe still feels impossible to pin down, and perhaps that is exactly why she continues to fascinate.