News24 | Marilyn Monroe at 100: Hollywood made her a myth – she spent her life resisting it

“I can be smart when it matters, but most men don’t like it,” says Lorelei Lee in the 1953 comedy musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

This famous quip from Howard Hawks’ film sums up for us the fate of the star who uttered it. Marilyn Monroe confronted the pitilessness of the 1950s Hollywood studio system during her short career as an actor (1946-1962). Today she is primarily remembered for her highly sexualised glamorous star image rather than her intelligence, skill and political acumen.

Monroe crystallised a certain vision of 1950s femininity that chimed with the decade’s ambivalent attitude towards female independence – fascinated by but also wary of women’s increasingly public displays of sexuality.

At the centenary of Monroe’s birth, the image that endures in the public imagination has been largely stripped of voice and agency. What remains are images. There are the iconic moments from her films – most famously the white skirt billowing above a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch (1955). There are the photographs captured by celebrated figures such as Richard Avedon and Eve Arnold, and the artworks she inspired by equally iconic artists like Andy Warhol.

Her most recognisable moments have been repeatedly appropriated and reinterpreted by later celebrities, including Madonna, Kim Kardashian and Ryan Gosling.

Even when Monroe was alive, people close to her frequently claimed that there was no artistry behind her cinematic roles, rather that she was simply “playing herself”. The director Fritz Lang remarked that she simply knew what effect she was having on men, nothing more. And playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband, said that “in everything she did, she was herself”.

Joshua Logan, the director of her 1956 film Bus Stop, admired her comic timing, but she longed to play serious roles too.

Monroe herself both accepted and rebelled against her sex symbol image, understanding the power it gave her but rejecting its dehumanising qualities. “That’s the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing,” she stated. “I just hate being a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol of something, I’d rather have it be sex than some other things we’ve got symbols of.”

In 1946, becoming a pin-up enabled Norma Jean Baker (Monroe’s birth name) to escape a working-class existence and pull herself up into a different world. She knew that her stardom was largely as a result of her appeal to young servicemen conscripted into war in Korea, including African-Americans. She used her star power to fight the racism, classism and sexism of the structures she worked within.

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