Galeria & Photomaton: Marilyn Monroe Galleries on LIFE

segunda-feira, 20 de junho de 2011

Marilyn Monroe Galleries on LIFE

June 7, 2011 by TidiousTed

The woman born Norma Jeane Mortensen had an appetite for modernist literature, a Dickensian childhood of hardship and abandonment, and an arranged marriage at age

16 to a neighbor’s son. None of this was evident in the dazzling, carefree, naïve, carnal image that Marilyn Monroecreated on screen, and that made her Hollywood’s all-time champion sex symbol. That image was what her fans fell in love with (and what new fans still fall in love with today, long after her death).

Monroe created an archetype, a woman who was sensuous and hedonistic yet innocent and seemingly unaware of the effect she had on everyone who laid eyes on her. She put forth the message that sex was good, clean, wholesome fun, in such movies as “Some Like It Hot” and “The Seven Year Itch,” in which the

scene of her luxuriating in the breeze blowing up her dress from a subway grate below distilled her unique blend of lasciviousness and sweetness into an iconic moment.

Being seen as a dizzy sex bomb made Monroe a screen legend, but it was also a trap. She had to fight to play more serious roles (like her impressive turn as the ragged lounge singer in 1956′s "Bus Stop"). And as Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller discovered, she wasn’t cut out for the role of dutiful wife, though the public was eager enough to cast her in the role of mistress to JFK (“Happy birth-day, Mr. Pres-i-dent…”).

Her death in 1962 of an overdose – she was just 36 years old, still gorgeous – finally made us curious about the flesh-and-blood woman behind the platinum-blonde image, but it did not diminish her luster. We’ll never know what really lay behind her Mona Lisa smile, and that mystery, too, keeps her alluring and alive. — Gary Susman

12 great Monroe image galleries from LIFE magazine: