Marilyn monroe biography essay

These ideas, beliefs, and ways of life were all trending and thriving during the sixties. It was a time of original ideas, contemporary [ Fame, fortune, and glamour, three little words that beseech every American. Marilyn Monroe was no exception to the American conquest to become a common household name. Her legacy, love life, and charming good looks will forever [ We will occasionally send you account related emails.

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Paper Topic. Deadline: in 10 days. Number of pages. Email Invalid email. Growing up, Monroe spent much of her time in foster care and in an orphanage. In , a family friend and her husband, Grace and Doc Goddard, took care of Monroe for a few years. The couple was deeply religious and followed fundamentalist doctrines; among other prohibited activities, Monroe was not allowed to go to the movies.

But when Doc's job was transferred to the East Coast, the couple could not afford to bring Monroe with them. At seven years old, Monroe returned to a life in foster homes, where she endured sexual assault on several occasions; she later said that she had been raped when she was 11 years old. She dropped out of high school by age Monroe had a way out through marriage, and she wed her boyfriend and merchant marine Jimmy Dougherty in , at the age of Monroe never knew her father.

She once thought Clark Gable to be her father — a story repeated often enough for a version of it to gain some currency. However, there's no evidence that Gable ever met or knew Monroe's mother, Gladys, who developed psychiatric problems and was eventually placed in a mental institution. As an adult, Monroe would maintain that one of her earliest memories was of her mother trying to smother her in her crib with a pillow.

Monroe had a half-sister, to whom she was not close; they met only a half-dozen times. Monroe dreamt of becoming an actress like Jean Harlow and Lana Turner. When her husband was sent to the South Pacific, she began working in a munitions factory in Van Nuys, California. It was there that she was first discovered by a photographer. By the time Dougherty returned in , Monroe had a successful career as a model.

That year, she signed her first movie contract. With the contract came a new name and image; she began calling herself "Marilyn Monroe" and dyed her hair blonde. At first, Monroe wasn't initially considered to be star acting material. Her acting career didn't really take off until a few years later. With her breathy voice and hourglass figure, she would soon become one of Hollywood's most famous actresses.

She proved her skill by winning various honors and attracting large audiences to her films. Monroe became a much-admired international star despite chronic insecurities regarding her acting abilities. For the role, she learned an Ozark accent , chose costumes and makeup that lacked the glamor of her earlier films, and provided deliberately mediocre singing and dancing.

Bus Stop was released in August and became a critical and commercial success. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress. Monroe also experienced other problems during the production. Her dependence on pharmaceuticals escalated and, according to Spoto, she had a miscarriage. After returning from England, Monroe took an month hiatus to concentrate on family life.

In the end, Wilder was happy with Monroe's performance, saying: "Anyone can remember lines, but it takes a real artist to come on the set and not know her lines and yet give the performance she did! She accepted the part solely because she was behind on her contract with Fox. While one report owes it to a suicide attempt, another claims that Monroe was feeling overcome with personal issues and telephoned psychoanalyst Marianne Kris, who committed her to the ward for "exhaustion".

Four days after her arrival, DiMaggio helped get her released. There was no empathy at Payne-Whitney — it had a very bad effect — they asked me after putting me in a 'cell' I mean cement blocks and all for very disturbed depressed patients except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn't committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic.

They asked me why I wasn't happy there everything was under lock and key; things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows — the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time, also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients. I answered: 'Well, I'd have to be nuts if I like it here'.

I sat on the bed trying to figure if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation what would I do. So I figured, it's a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak but I got the idea from a movie I made once called 'Don't Bother to Knock'. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it, and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life—against the glass intentionally.

It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass—so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. The last film Monroe completed was John Huston 's film The Misfits , which Miller had written to provide her with a dramatic role. Monroe disliked that he had based her role partly on her life, and thought it inferior to the male roles.

She also struggled with Miller's habit of rewriting scenes the night before filming. It was the real thing. She would go deep down within herself and find it and bring it up into consciousness. Monroe and Miller separated after filming wrapped, and she obtained a Mexican divorce in January Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute has called it a classic, [ ] Huston scholar Tony Tracy called Monroe's performance the "most mature interpretation of her career", [ ] and Geoffrey McNab of The Independent praised her "extraordinary" portrayal of the character's "power of empathy".

Monroe was next to star in a television adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham 's " Rain " for NBC , but the project fell through as the network did not want to hire her choice of director, Lee Strasberg. She underwent a cholecystectomy and surgery for her endometriosis, and spent four weeks hospitalized for depression. Monroe returned to the public eye in the spring of Despite medical advice to postpone the production, Fox began it as planned in late April.

President " on stage at President John F. Monroe next filmed a scene for Something's Got to Give in which she swam naked in a swimming pool. This was the first time that a major star had posed nude at the height of their career. Fox soon regretted its decision and reopened negotiations with Monroe later in June; a settlement about a new contract, including recommencing Something's Got to Give and a starring role in the black comedy What a Way to Go!

Her housekeeper Eunice Murray was staying overnight at the home on the evening of August 4, She saw light from under Monroe's bedroom door but was unable to get a response and found the door locked. Murray then called Monroe's psychiatrist Ralph Greenson , who arrived at the house shortly after and broke into the bedroom through a window.

He found a nude Monroe dead in her bed, covered by a sheet, with her hand clamped around a telephone receiver. At a. Monroe died between p. It could have been an accident, because I had just talked to her a short time before. She told me what she had planned to do, she had just bought a new house and she was working on the curtains of the windows.

She had so many things to look forward to and she was so happy. Monroe's sudden death was front-page news in the United States and Europe. Her funeral, held at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on August 8, was private and attended by only her closest associates. I love you. In the following decades, several conspiracy theories , including murder and accidental overdose, have been introduced to contradict suicide as the cause of Monroe's death.

The s had been the heyday for actresses who were perceived as tough and smart—such as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck —who had appealed to women-dominated audiences during the war years. From the beginning, Monroe played a significant part in the creation of her public image, and towards the end of her career exerted almost full control over it.

In her films, Monroe usually played "the beautiful blonde girl", who is defined solely by her gender. Monroe often wore white to emphasize her blondness and drew attention by wearing revealing outfits that showed off her figure. Although Monroe's screen persona as a dim-witted but sexually attractive blonde was a carefully crafted act, audiences and film critics believed it to be her real personality.

This became a hindrance when she wanted to pursue other kinds of roles, or to be respected as a businesswoman. The biggest myth is that she was dumb. The second is that she was fragile. The third is that she couldn't act. She was far from dumb, although she was not formally educated, and she was very sensitive about that. But she was very smart indeed—and very tough.

She had to be both to beat the Hollywood studio system in the s. Such a good actress that no one now believes she was anything but what she portrayed on screen. Biographer Lois Banner writes that Monroe often subtly parodied her sex symbol status in her films and public appearances, [ ] and that "the 'Marilyn Monroe' character she created was a brilliant archetype, who stands between Mae West and Madonna in the tradition of twentieth-century gender tricksters.

According to Dyer, Monroe became "virtually a household name for sex" in the s and "her image has to be situated in the flux of ideas about morality and sexuality that characterised the Fifties in America", such as Freudian ideas about sex, the Kinsey report , and Betty Friedan 's The Feminine Mystique Dyer has also argued that Monroe's blonde hair became her defining feature because it made her "racially unambiguous" and exclusively white just as the civil rights movement was beginning, and that she should be seen as emblematic of racism in twentieth-century popular culture.

Monroe was perceived as a specifically American star, "a national institution as well known as hot dogs, apple pie, or baseball" according to Photoplay. If America was to export the democracy of glamour into post-war, impoverished Europe, the movies could be its shop window Marilyn Monroe, with her all American attributes and streamlined sexuality, came to epitomise in a single image this complex interface of the economic, the political, and the erotic.

By the mids, she stood for a brand of classless glamour, available to anyone using American cosmetics, nylons and peroxide. Twentieth Century-Fox further profited from Monroe's popularity by cultivating several lookalike actresses, such as Jayne Mansfield and Sheree North. I don't mean that in the obvious way—the perhaps too obvious way.

I don't think she's an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—could never surface on the stage. It's so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It's like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. The Smithsonian Institution has included her on their list of " Most Significant Americans of All Time", [ ] and both Variety and VH1 have placed her in the top ten in their rankings of the greatest popular culture icons of the twentieth century.

Hundreds of books have been written about Monroe. She has been the subject of numerous films, plays, operas, and songs, and has influenced artists and entertainers such as Andy Warhol and Madonna. Monroe's enduring popularity is tied to her conflicted public image. Owing to the contrast between her stardom and troubled private life, Monroe is closely linked to broader discussions about modern phenomena such as mass media, fame, and consumer culture.

Monroe remains a cultural icon , but critics are divided on her legacy as an actress. David Thomson called her body of work "insubstantial" [ ] and Pauline Kael wrote that she could not act, but rather "used her lack of an actress's skills to amuse the public. She had the wit or crassness or desperation to turn cheesecake into acting—and vice versa; she did what others had the 'good taste' not to do".

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. American actress and model — For other uses, see Norma Jean disambiguation and Marilyn Monroe disambiguation. Los Angeles, California , U. James Dougherty. Joe DiMaggio.

Arthur Miller. Main article: Death of Marilyn Monroe. Monroe third from left with actors on the filming set of The Exterminating Angel during her visit to Mexico in February , one of her last media appearances. One of Monroe's last photoshoots by George Barris , 23 days before her death , July Screen persona and reception. Main article: Marilyn Monroe performances and awards.

Dangerous Years Scudda Hoo! Main article: Marilyn Monroe in popular culture. Although she then contained the resulting scandal by claiming she had reluctantly posed nude due to an urgent need for cash, biographers Spoto and Banner have stated that she was not pressured although according to Banner, she was initially hesitant due to her aspirations of movie stardom and regarded the shoot as simply another work assignment.

Monroe also had a role in Home Town Story , released in She told him about her grievances with the studio, and Greene suggested that they start their own production company. Although they sometimes had casual sexual encounters, there is no evidence that their relationship was serious.

Marilyn monroe biography essay

Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on September 25, Retrieved September 23, American Film Institute. Marilyn became a housewife, but the couple were not close, and Monroe reports being bored. They split up shortly after. Marilyn Monroe appearing in Yank Army Weekly. To earn a living, Marilyn took a job at a local munitions factory in Burbank, California.

It was here that Marilyn got her first big break. Photographer David Conover was covering the munitions factory to show women at work for the War effort. He was struck by the beauty and photogenic nature of Norma, and he used her in many of his photographs. This enabled her to start a career as a model, and she was soon featured on the front of many magazine covers.

She took drama lessons and got her first movie contract with Twentieth Century Fox. These successful film roles thrust her into the global limelight. She became an iconic figure of Hollywood glamour and fashion. She was an epitome of sensuality, beauty and effervescence and was naturally photogenic. But she often found the trappings of fame difficult to deal with.

It stirs up envy, fame does.