Marilyn Monroe Biography
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Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles. For most of her childhood and teen years she was in foster homes as her father abandoned her while her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, was admitted to a mental hospital.
In 1942 she married James Dougherty, an aircraft factory worker, and when he went to sea in the merchant marine she took a job in a target airplane factory. Asked to model to illustrate an article in Yank magazine, she soon quit her job to become a full-time model and in 1946, after divorcing Dougherty, she went to Hollywood to try to become an actress. Signed by Twentieth-Century Fox, she changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, but for the next few years she had only minor roles in several movies. During one period of unemployment she posed nude for a pin-up calendar that would later become a collector's item. Not until her small roles in two 1950 movies, "The Asphalt Jungle" and "All About Eve" did her career take off. Monroe was married to former baseball star Joe DiMaggio for about nine months during 1954. Determined to shed her image as a sex symbol, she began to study at Lee and Paula Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York City.
On August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead of an overdose of barbiturates in her home in Los Angeles. Her death has caused much controversy for many years, and many theories have risen as to the real reasons behind her death. She had been working on her last film, "Something's Got to Give". After several years in which she was discussed almost entirely in terms of a sex goddess, she came to be perceived as a symbol of the exploitation of women by Hollywood and men in general. |
She gave two of her more sophisticated performances in "Bus Stop" (1956) and "Some Like It Hot" (1959). In 1956 she married playwright Arthur Miller and starred in a movie he wrote for her, "The Misfits" (1961), divorcing in 1961.