Marilyn Monroe: The Centenary

ON OUR RADAR | HAPPENINGS | WORLD OF CABANA

A century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe continues to captivate. As major exhibitions in Los Angeles and London revisit her life through extraordinary photographs and personal stories, Anthea Gerrie explores what they reveal: the woman behind the icon, an artist of intelligence, vulnerability and ambition whose search for love and recognition never truly ended.

BY ANTHEA GERRIE | HAPPENINGS | 15 JULY 2026 

Lawrence Schiller, Marilyn emerging From Pool, 1962, Signed and numbered in ink on recto © Peter Fetterman Gallery.

She did not make it to 40, but Marilyn Monroe never died – the blonde bombshell is still with us, as luminous as ever in her centenary year. Thousands of images, from the rare to the familiar, are currently flooding the consciousness of movie buffs and gallery-goers worldwide, many not yet born when she died in 1962. But the pictures tell only part of her story. The rest is told by co-stars, directors and the legendary photographers who captured her vulnerability and aching desire for the love and professional respect she never quite managed to fulfil, despite the fame and glamour surrounding her.

It’s a tale being beautifully told in two cities: Los Angeles, where she was born and many of the key events of her life played out, and London, where she did at least get respect for her acting from Laurence Olivier, with whom she co-starred in The Prince and The Showgirl. Despite the troubled shoot – the first of many in her last few years – he admitted: “She gave a star performance….Marilyn was quite wonderful.”

There are some other telling quotes in the show at London’s National Portrait Gallery from Marilyn herself, particularly about the love of her life, third husband Arthur Miller, and their honeymoon period. “This is the first time I’ve been really in love….I’m mad about him,” she wrote to Sam Shaw, who took up her invitation to come and capture the couple at their country home in Connecticut.

Love was a precious commodity forever escaping the woman who missed out on mother love from her earliest days, passed to strangers to raise when she was only two weeks old. Arguably her greatest tragedy was being unable to carry to term her own child, an event she believed would finally liberate her from loneliness.

Marilyn Monroe, Ballerina Sitting, 1954, by Milton H. Greene, Milton H. Greene © MHG Collective, LLC.

Shaw was the photographer who, after grabbing the iconic money shot of Marilyn standing over a New York subway grate in Seven-Year Itch, white dress blowing up around her, became the close friend who may well have introduced her to the erudite playwright Miller, surmises LA gallerist Peter Fetterman. “He was part of that New York circle of intellectuals Marilyn aspired to join; it included Arthur Miller as well as Marillyn’s acting coaches, Lee and Paula Strasberg”, says Fetterman, whose own display of Marilyn images rivals the bigger show at Hollywood’s Academy Museum.

Shaw’s most famous images of the Millers during their five-year marriage show them against iconic Manhattan bridges as well as picking flowers in the countryside. There is no doubt Marilyn encouraged these portraits of herself as a loving wife – she considered the photographers who courted her, among them world-famous Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon, as collaborators. She was persuaded early in her career by a less well-known name, Milton H. Greene, that she could control her image and create her own narrative: “He fell in love with her and then he became her business manager,” says Fetterman of the co-founder of Marilyn Monroe Productions whose family home became a refuge for Marilyn during her many movie studio conflicts.

Elliott Erwitt, 1928-2023 Marilyn Monroe, New York, 1956, printed later © Peter Fetterman Gallery

The duo commissioned notable films in her portfolio including Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, which despite the plaudits for her acting from Olivier marked the beginning of the end in a series of troubled shoots. One miscarriage is attributed to this period, another known to occur just as the shoot wrapped on Some Like It Hot. Miller clearly blamed director Billy Wilder, and the never-before-displayed exchange of angry telegrams between the loving husband and the exasperated director is a star exhibit at the Academy Museum show. Wilder complained about losing 18 shooting days, while Miller robustly responded that it had been made clear by her doctor that his pregnant wife was not supposed to be working full days on the set.

The film went on to be the greatest critical and commercial hit for both Wilder and his troublesome star, but The Misfits, her final movie, was an even more tumultuous shoot in spite of throwing up amazingly candid and intimate pictures of Marilyn. They were taken by Eve Arnold, like Shaw and Greene as much a friend as a trusted collaborator. By the time the film wrapped, Marilyn’s marriage to Miller, who wrote the screenplay, was over: “He loved her, but he couldn’t save her from herself,” says Fetterman.

It was Bert Stern who would execute the last sitting Marilyn undertook, producing, alongside images published by Vogue within weeks of her death, a posthumously-shocking “crucifix” series, as the rejects Marilyn indicated with a lipsticked cross on the contact sheet came to be known. They were eventually published anyway – a compelling visual comment by the star who felt she was maligned and misunderstood from the moment she entered the movie business.

For all the great professional shots, the most affecting images of Marilyn are those she made herself, from the photo-booth snap of a teenage Norma Jeane playfully posing in a big movie-star-style hat to the pictures she drew of herself, a talented artist as well as actress and comedienne. She gave a deprecatory caption – “What the hell, that’s life” – to her sketch of herself as a series of one-dimensional curves topped by a heavily made-up face, perhaps summing up her frustration that few saw anything of the soul and intellect which lay behind her shiny, commodified surface.

A comment she made at the height of her career said it all: ‘People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person.”

Marilyn Monroe, 1946, by André De Dienes, © André de Dienes / MUUS Collection.

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Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait runs at London’s National Portrait Gallery until September 6, 2026.

Marilyn Monroe: A Science Life runs at the Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, until September 5, 2026.

Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon runs at the Academy Museum, Los Angeles until February 28, 2027.