His smile seems to have always been there. But no, Marilyn Monroe will turn 100 on June 1, 2026 and the world is preparing to celebrate her. Icon of beauty and femininity, legend of the cinema and beyond, the blonde par excellence is perhaps too familiar to us to look into her half-closed eyes and wonder who she was without the spotlight, without the bright red lipstick and the myth that has surrounded her from the beginning like one of her sparkling dresses.
But time helps us: the initiatives announced on the occasion of the actress’s centenary invite us to get to know her in all her complexity. The first is the publication of a book, Marilyn. Dea. Diva. Donna By Chiara Pasqualetti Johnsonpublished by White Star and available in bookstores for a few days: an intimate and passionate story of a star between film and private life, beyond the mask, to discover his deep and restless soul. “Who was Marilyn Monroe anyway? To look for her, I tried to look beyond the prejudices and forced myself to tell her story without judging her,” the author writes: “To see the real Marilyn, you have to break the image of the goddess and that of the diva, and let yourself be surprised by the woman she was. Intelligent, strong-willed, full of talent and equipped with an extraordinary sense of humor.”
A beautiful and very young Norma Jeane poses on the beach at the start of her career © Donaldson Collection / Getty Images
Among 120 photographs, background stories and anecdotes signed by famous masters that relive the golden age of Hollywood, Marilyn’s life flows like a movie: from her difficult childhood, marked by the rejection of both parents, to her relationships with men, very different, but not always enthusiastic about having the most sought-after woman in America at her side, or to the tormented search for motherhood; From the titanic battle she waged with herself to ‘be better than she thought she was’ to the effort and joy of being a great actress, the common thread is probably the desire for love.
Despite constantly smiling “like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa”, Marilyn is not happy. “And perhaps it is precisely in that mysterious sadness that lies the secret of a charm that remains unchanged today,” the author writes. But there is a lot of irony in his stories. One memorable evening she comes face to face with Clarke Gable, her childhood idol because he reminds her of the father she never knew. As they dance, she reveals to him that as a child she believed he was her real father and they laugh and promise to make a movie together soon. The desire to live every moment to the fullest never fails her: “We all have to start living before we get too old. Fear is stupid. That’s how regret comes,” she says, but Marilyn will never grow old.
On the left the famous photo of Marilyn Monroe in the flowing white dress, designed by costume designer William Travilla for the film The Seven Year Itch © MGP76 / Stock Alamy Photo. On the right the set that was set up in New York on the night of September 15 to 16, 1954 when the iconic image of the diva was taken © Bettman / Getty Images
The second appointment takes us to London, in the rooms of the National Portrait Gallerywhere a major exhibition has already been announced to open on June 4, 2026, three days after the diva’s centenary. Marilyn Monroe: a portrait will tell it through the eyes of famous photographers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting the active and creative approach of the actress in the creation of many of the images shown.
From her first pin-up portraits, when she was a young model named Norma Jeane, to the iconic photos taken on the beach in Malibu in 1962, Marilyn was probably one of the most photographed people in the world. Cecil Beaton, Philippe Halsman, Bernard of Hollywood, André de Dienes, Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Milton Greene, Sam Shaw, Richard Avedon and George Barris are among the authors of the shots presented, while works by Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty, Marlene Dumas, James Gill, Rosalyn Drexler, Audrey Flack will demonstrate the power of Marilyn’s image in the art world, from the 1950s and 1960s, when she attracted the attention of authors such as Richard Hamilton and Warhol, to today, when her inspiration shows no signs of waning.
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