Studio blonde who founded her own production company
Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), born Norma Jeane Mortenson, became the 1950s blonde bombshell whose films took in about $200 million—then fought the typecast by creating her own company with Milton Greene in 1954 and studying Method under Lee Strasberg. She died at thirty-six; the AFI still ranks her among screen legends.
Born 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles as Norma Jeane Mortenson, she bounced through temporary households and institutional care, then wed James Dougherty when she was sixteen. Her early years were spent with foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender in Hawthorne; in September 1935 she was placed in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. When her guardians moved to West Virginia in 1942 and state law barred taking her along, she left school and married neighbour Dougherty on 19 June to avoid returning to the orphanage. While Dougherty served in the Pacific, she worked at the Radioplane munitions plant in Van Nuys, where photographer David Conover found her. She dyed her curly brown hair platinum and by early 1946 had appeared on 33 magazine covers. Darryl F. Zanuck, unimpressed by her screen test, still gave her a six-month deal to keep RKO from signing her. That wartime job led to First Motion Picture Unit pin-up work and brief contracts at Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. By 1953 she headlined Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire, locking a dumb-blonde comic brand; the same year her nude photos appeared as centerfold and cover of Playboy’s first issue.
When Fox resisted rewriting her deal, she and friend Milton Greene launched a production company, spent 1955 building it, and trained at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. Fox then granted more control and a larger salary. Tabloid glare followed her marriages to retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller; both unions dissolved, feeding coverage that rarely matched her push for serious parts.
On 4 August 1962 she died in her Los Angeles home of a barbiturate overdose ruled a probable suicide. She remains a pop-culture emblem of mid-century sexuality and studio power struggles—proof that the most marketable face in Hollywood still had to incorporate herself to renegotiate the contract.
Source: Marilyn Monroe
