Saturdays with the Stars: Marilyn Monroe

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Lana Turner, an actress whose personal life frequently outshone a film career that spanned decades.  This month, we will turn to the ultimate Hollywood sex symbol, the woman who has become synonymous with the phrase, and who is perhaps the textbook definition of an actress whose personal life and celebrity mystique have overshadowed the actual movies that made her a household name.  Yes, this month, our star is Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortensen (the Baker came later)...but you already knew that.  Unlike virtually every other actress we've profiled in either season of this series, Monroe is so famous that even her origin story is the stuff of legend, from her early days as a pin-up model to the nude expose for Playboy that threatened her career.  So well-known is Monroe that I almost didn't include her in this series, as I view the entire concept of "Saturdays with the Stars" to be about discovery, and Marilyn is an actress that everyone knows & whose story is told perpetually.

But it's her movies that intrigue me, and those honestly don't get enough discussion.  Monroe was a contract star for 20th Century Fox, and for the first few years of her time with the studio, she had successful but not really outstanding roles.  She made All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle, two undisputed classics, but she was in small parts in both films, and it's Bette Davis & Sterling Hayden you remember more from these movies.  Monroe didn't start having major success on the big screen until 1953, when Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and How to Marry a Millionaire brought her huge box office & top billing, and enough star goodwill that she would make movies almost annually for the rest of her life.

It is this Marilyn that we're going to look at this month-the Marilyn Monroe that was seen on big screens, not in interviews or photos or celebrity marriages or ultimately in utter tragedy when she died of a probable suicide at the age of 36.  I have seen a lot of the major Monroe pictures (All About Eve, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, There's No Business Like Show Business, and Some Like It Hot, among others), but I have enough of her signature roles still left unseen that we'll be able to take a proper look at the star, the woman behind the legend.  This month, we'll look not at the quintessential blonde nor the Norma Jean Baker who created her, but at "Marilyn Monroe...Actress."