Happy Birthday Marilyn Monroe! The Face That Changed Pop Culture Forever

Words: Misha MN | Photography: Lewis Vorn | Makeup: Aimee Twist at A-Frame Agency with thanks to Lisa Eldridge & Kylie Cosmetics | Hair: Linus Johansson using Maria Nila | Styling: Emi Papanikola | Set Design - Juliette Nastasia | Talent: Tabitha Bennett, Miriam Pescaru both with Anti Agency, Kaitlyn De Heer with Storm Models

Marilyn Monroe. The name itself echoes down through the decades, a thousand pictures burst like stars in the Hollywood cosmos; she is a timeless beauty that remains an icon in the truest sense of the word. On what would have been her 100th birthday, we can celebrate what made her one of the most recognisable images of all time, the impact she left on cinema and the faces of women everywhere. 

Marilyn now is not just a star, though her skills in musical comedies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Some Like It Hot (1959) still hold up today, she is a blueprint for beauty, an ideal that no one can ever recreate, no matter how hard they try. Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn (2011), Mira Sorvino in Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996), Ana de Armas in Blonde (2022), they all lack that one elusive spark that makes Marilyn MARILYN; her vitality. Call it what you will, the “it” quality, the x factor, the star power, the complex makeup of Marilyn’s specific kind of charisma is totally unique. 

The closest we see it being recreated on screen is Anita Eckberg in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Eckberg plays a Marilyn-esque star (with platinum hair and a curvaceous figure) who visits Rome and has everyone so enamoured with her that they will do anything she asks. “You are the first woman on the first day of creation. You are mother, sister, lover, friend, angel, devil, earth, home.” Marilyn was not the first star in history, but she is the one that is remembered most.

Marilyn comes from a long lineage of Blonde Bombshells, starting with the Platinum Goddess herself; Jean Harlow. Jean’s beauty was lean and lithe, bias cut silk gowns and pencil thin eye brows, ushering in an era of iconic golden-haired beauties. Mae West’s blonde curls were piled high on her head, framing a round face and rosebud mouth, whereas Marlene Dietrich parted hers to the side and when she was backlit it stood out like a halo, her cigarette tracing a ladder to the heavens. Even Greta Garbo, one of the greatest stars to ever grace the screen found herself bleaching her naturally blonde Swedish tresses to stand out in the Hollywood firmament. Marilyn was a new kind of blonde, a blonde for the modern age, an Atomic Blonde. Her hair was as platinum as Harlow’s, but it feels more real. It blows in the wind, it flips around when Marilyn throws her head back to laugh, it looks soft as she runs her fingers through it. Marilyn’s beauty isn’t in a studied way of standing, or in an overly elegant wardrobe, it's in her very existence in the crosshairs of authenticity and glamour.

“Marilyn Monroe is an image burned onto the screens of millions worldwide, but how much of her do we recognise merely as a symbol?”

The planes of Marilyn’s face are a mysterious dreamland, both real and illusory. Half the time we see her in technical studio lighting, highlighting her cheekbones, her chin, the lift of her nose, but we also see her reduced to the pop art flatness of a Warhol print. Marilyn was a real person who could play the role of a cartoon bombshell, who then became a 2D icon, a mass produced painted face in every colour imaginable. The photo Andy Warhol used for his famous screen print was a 1953 publicity shot by Gene Korman for the film Niagara, and seeing this portrait in its original format is strikingly uncanny. Her skin is smooth but not acrylic, her hair is soft, her teeth are bared, her lashes cast shadows on her cheeks, she is a real human woman. In modern times, when the Warhol Marilyn is more widely circulated than this Korman photograph, they take on a sort of Galatea narrative; the artist’s flat rendition of the perfect woman has life breathed into her by the Goddess of Love and she becomes living breathing flesh. Pygmalion wept.

There is a famous anecdote told by Robert Stein, a young magazine editor, and his photographer Ed Feingersh about how they pursued Marilyn for an interview and spent a few afternoons with her in 1955, tracking her movements and conducting long interviews. He talks about seeing her slide in and out of the public Marilyn persona, the slipping of the mask in private, the exhaustive toll her performance took on her. One afternoon, walking around New York and riding the subway in a camel coat and a subdued hairstyle, she managed to go totally unnoticed by the general public, just another good looking woman going about her business. 

She turned to Robert and asked “Do you want to see her?” She opened her coat, fluffed up her hair and suddenly she was MARILYN. A crowd formed immediately, all clamouring to see her as if she was an alien beamed down on Broadway from outer space, and she soon had to be whisked away before it became too much.

Marilyn Monroe is an image burned onto the screens of millions worldwide, but how much of her do we recognise merely as a symbol? We remember the smiling red mouth of the Warhol print, but close inspection of her personal makeup case shows her frequently used lipsticks were actually orange, more often than not. Her face exists in the nebulous place between fantasy and reality, a woman living in the world but who must exist on film. Technicolor, Eastmancolor, Kodachrome, all these golden age cinema colour processes gave different results, so the physical reality of Marilyn, the textures, the colours, the hues, resides somewhere in the slippages and the overlaps of these created worlds. 

Mirroring what Marcello Mastraionni says to the Marilyn-esque star on La Dolce Vita, Monroe’s friend and confidant Paula Strasberg has been reported as saying “My dear, you haven’t yet any idea of your position in the world. You are the greatest woman of your time, of any time.” Marilyn was a presence and vitality that shook Hollywood to its foundations, and now she is an image that can never be scrubbed from the public consciousness. Marilyn is ingrained in mass memory. Marilyn is Forever.