Marilyn Monroe Photos: Her Life, Career and Lasting Legacy

Few stars have shaped modern celebrity culture the way Marilyn Monroe did. At the height of her Hollywood fame in the 1950s, she was among the most photographed people on the planet. And decades after her death, her image remains instantly recognizable: the bedroom eyes, the hourglass figure, the beauty mark—and, of course, the swoop of platinum hair. 

“Marilyn was brilliant at creating a persona,” says Sophia Serrano, curator of the exhibition Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Behind one of the most enduring celebrity images in history, though, was a woman who carefully crafted her own mythology while struggling to control it in a studio system that often treated her as a commodity. These photographs trace Marilyn Monroe’s life and career—from her early modeling days to her rise as a Hollywood legend—and reveal how she became the defining image of American stardom.

Born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, Norma Jeane never knew her father, though she fantasized he was Clark Gable, according to Donald Spoto, author of Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. She lived in a foster home until age 7, then for a couple of years with her mother, who would park the girl at a movie theater for the day while she worked as a film splicer at Consolidated Film Industries. 

After that, as Norma Jeane shuttled between foster homes and an orphanage, the cinema became her refuge. “She was incredibly aware of Hollywood when she was growing up, and she went to the movies to escape,” Serrano says.

Norma Jeane dropped out of high school at 16 to marry James Dougherty. At the defense plant where she worked during World War II, a photographer noticed the way she lit up in front of a camera, and she soon began posing for pinups. 

From the start, she was a perfectionist, examining every contact sheet—a habit she maintained throughout her career. “She always required them to give her the contact sheets, and she would cross out things she didn't want to be circulated,” Serrano says. “One photographer we interviewed said she would cut up the negative so he couldn't use it.” 

Dougherty was the first of Monroe’s husbands to object to her career, and not the last she divorced as a result. At 20, she received a contract at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios and a new name: Marilyn Monroe. 

Fox’s freshly minted starlet reported to the studio every day, though she wasn’t required to, asking questions in the lighting, camera and costume departments. Makeup artist Allan Snyder became a lifelong friend. He told biographer Spoto, “I remember thinking that here was a very determined and ambitious girl."

Monroe landed a small role in Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! before Fox opted not to renew her contract. After submitting to electrolysis to raise her hairline and bleaching her hair a paler blonde, she got a six-month contract at Columbia Pictures. 

Eventually Monroe alighted at MGM for director John Huston’s 1950 noir The Asphalt Jungle, where she proved she could nail a dramatic role with an A-list director. Back at Fox, another small but high-profile part, in writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, revealed her confidence as a comedian: The “dumb blonde” was in on the joke.

By 1952, Monroe was a star on the rise, shooting Monkey Business with Cary Grant, when the studio got wind of a brewing scandal.

Back in 1949, she had posed nude for a calendar; now a reprint was circulating. Monroe, never ashamed of her body, laid out for a reporter a story many Americans could relate to: “A few years ago, when I had no money for food or rent…” Sidestepping the studio machine, she appealed directly to the public. “Fox is fully anticipating her career to dissolve with that scandal,” Serrano says. “And she really owns it.”

A single scene in the noir thriller Niagara incinerated any doubts about Monroe’s capacity to anchor a feature. During a party at a Niagara Falls resort, Rose (Monroe) emerges from her cabin in a hot-pink dress that hugs every nuance of her form. “Get out the firehose!” one character exclaims.

She holds the whole party in thrall as she sings along to a record in a husky mezzo: "Kiss me... Hold me tight…” When her on-screen husband (Joseph Cotten) smashes the record, she quips that he’d prefer “a rocking chair and a corny old tune.” The movie became one of Fox’s biggest box-office hits that year.

The Technicolor extravaganza Gentlemen Prefer Blondes marked Monroe’s first bona fide star turn—though she earned around $15,000 for the picture, per the terms of her contract, writes Spoto, while her co-star Jane Russell got $150,000. Russell recalled that after the set shut down for the day, an exhausted Monroe would stay on with choreographer Jack Cole for extra rehearsals. 

For one of the film’s musical numbers, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” costume designer William Travilla created a skimpy showgirl ensemble for its star. With the studio fretting over fallout from that nude calendar photo—indeed, it became the centerfold of Playboy magazine’s first issue—Travilla had to pivot to something more modest. Monroe’s striking pink gown became a Hollywood icon.

When they met, Joe DiMaggio was 37 and recently retired from baseball; Monroe was 25 and just hitting her stride in Hollywood. He wanted a full-time wife and objected to the way she displayed her body. Loud, occasionally violent confrontations allegedly ensued.

When they married on January 14, 1954, at San Francisco City Hall, no reporters were allowed in, but Monroe did alert a Fox publicist just before they took their vows. They emerged to a crowd of some 500 reporters, photographers and fans.

Fox had ordered Monroe to report to set for a movie called Pink Tights—another dumb-blonde role. Wanting some say over the parts she played, and more equitable pay, she effectively went on strike, flying to Japan with DiMaggio, who planned to attend some exhibition baseball games.

Invited to travel on to Korea to entertain U.S. troops there, Monroe jumped at the chance. “As 20th Century-Fox starts a negative press campaign against her, that's when she decides to perform for the troops,” Serrano says. “It really wins her a lot of leverage with the public.”

Monroe and the studio came to terms, at least for the moment. In exchange for playing a supporting role in There's No Business Like Show Business, Monroe would star later that year in The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder, with a promised bonus of $100,000.

For the latter film, Travilla engineered the famous white “subway dress” to billow upward on cue as Monroe stood on a sidewalk grate. When they shot the scene in New York, some 2,000 fans showed up to catch the view. (This was purely for publicity; the scene was reshot later in a studio.) Outraged at the spectacle, DiMaggio stormed off. Two weeks later, Monroe filed for divorce.

With photographer Milton Greene, she founded Marilyn Monroe Productions to gain creative control over the films she made. In an interview with Edward R. Murrow, Monroe explained, “It's not that I object to doing musicals and comedies. In fact, I rather enjoy them. But I'd like to do dramatic parts, too."

To pursue that goal, she decamped to New York, where she studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, a founder of Method acting, in which actors draw on personal experiences to build a character. Psychotherapy was advised as a complement, and Monroe signed on for that too. Strasberg, his wife, Paula, and their daughter, Susan, became a family for Monroe. But the emotional work took a toll, and Monroe’s dependence on barbiturates intensified.

During Monroe’s time in New York, her friendship with the playwright Arthur Miller sparked into a love affair. Miller was married at the time, and his outspoken left-wing views put him under ongoing investigation by the FBI. In June 1956, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

That same month, Miller obtained a divorce and also married Monroe. In 1957, he began the screenplay for The Misfits, with a main character transparently based on Monroe. Written and rewritten as their relationship deteriorated, the bleak contemporary Western was both the serious dramatic film Monroe had longed to make and painfully personal. By the time the film was released in 1961, the couple had already divorced. 

By all accounts, the production of Some Like It Hot proved challenging. In poor health mentally and physically, Monroe was using barbiturates heavily, perpetually late and at odds with director Billy Wilder and costars Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. 

Yet onscreen, Monroe delivers a luminous, very funny performance as Sugar Kane, a singer and ukulele player in an all-female band joined by two male musicians in drag, on the run from the mob. The loopy farce is widely regarded as a comedy classic.

Even as gossip buzzed about an alleged affair between President John F. Kennedy and Monroe, she agreed to sing “Happy Birthday” to him at a Democratic fundraiser at New York’s Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. With wicked wit, she delivered a breathy, sexy rendition, then led the crowd of 15,000 in singing together. The gown Monroe wore—barely-there, flesh-toned and dripping with crystals—gained its own iconic status. In 2016, it sold at auction for a record $4.8 million. In 2022, reality TV star Kim Kardashian donned it for the Met Gala, a salute to Monroe’s daring style and savvy image-making. 

In the final months of her life, after Fox fired her from the film Something’s Got to Give, Monroe collaborated with photographers George Barris and Bert Stern on some of the most intimate and poignant portraits of her life. 

She also invited journalist Richard Meryman and photographer Allan Grant from Life magazine to visit her Brentwood home for a candid interview—once again appealing directly to the public. She was adamant on this point: “[If] I am a star—the people made me a star—no studio, no person, but the people did.”