Credits: public domain (Photoplay, 1953), layout by Ecostylia Media with the help of AI.
Marilyn Monroe would have turned one hundred today, June 1, 2026. Hollywood made her blonde, mercenary, and ditsy. The Cinémathèque française, however, gives us something else. For the duration of an exhibition, we found an actress of fearsome precision and a businesswoman ahead of her time. Behind the myth, a strategist — and it’s about time we looked her in the face.
An Exhibition That Turns The Myth Inside Out
You enter the exhibition as if into a studio. A door slams, and the noise of the world goes quiet. On the raspberry wall, in metal letters, a phrase sets the tone: “Marilyn Monroe 100 Years!” The misunderstanding starts there. That exclamation point, cheerful, promises the star. The layout, however, patiently conducts the trial of that stardom. It wants to return someone else to us.
The approach is asserted from the first room. Curator Florence Tissot sums it up in one phrase: “Celebrate the star, exhibit the actress.” The exhibition is at the Cinémathèque française, from April 8 to July 26, 2026. A retrospective of her films extends through July 12. The starting observation is unsettling. Marilyn Monroe was, the catalogue says, “as much disparaged as a performer as she was adored as a star.” We remember her photographs more than her films. We retained a silhouette, not a craft.
The scenography, deceptively restrained, works entirely on the gaze. It organizes “reverberations” between Marilyn and those who look at her. Yesterday, gawkers crowded behind the “Police line, do not cross” barriers on the set of The Seven Year Itch. Today, it’s us, the visitors. Very quickly, we stop being spectators: it is our own gaze that the exhibition treats as its object.
Norma Jeane, Or The Making Of A Star
Before the myth, there is a child. Norma Jeane Mortenson, baptized Baker, was born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. Her mother, Gladys, was weakened by mental illness. The father was absent. The most likely hypothesis, reinforced by a DNA analysis in 2022, points to a certain Charles Stanley Gifford. Nothing, however, is certain. Childhood was spent in homes and foster families. Later, the studio publicity department invented a Cinderella melodrama. It went so far as to present her two parents as dead. In May 1952, the press revealed that her mother was indeed alive, employed near Los Angeles. The lie was part of the product.
In 1944, Norma Jeane worked in a munitions factory when a military photographer noticed her. The image became famous. A young factory worker smiles at the camera amid the American war effort. A few months later, she began a modeling career. The transformation could begin.
When she signed her first contract with Fox, the Hollywood industry operated like a gigantic machine to produce stars. 20th Century-Fox then employed several thousand people and controlled every detail of its actors’ images.
With Marilyn, little or nothing escaped that logic. Her hair was lightened. Certain facial features were retouched. Lighting was studied. Photographs meticulously composed.
The exhibition recalls a often-forgotten aspect of this manufacture: it takes place in an America still deeply segregated. The female ideal promoted by Hollywood was white, blond, and unattainable. Marilyn Monroe would become its perfect embodiment.
But behind this carefully constructed image, another reality already surfaces. A detail displayed in a case speaks volumes about that era. Phil Moore, who accompanied Marilyn in her early artistic training, was one of the first African-American musicians employed by a major studio. A presence that then remained exceptional in an industry still traversed by racial barriers.
Behind the glamour, there is always an era. And behind Marilyn, a young woman who already understood she would have to fight to exist as more than an image.
The Misunderstanding Of The “Dumb Blonde”
This is where the founding misunderstanding knots. Fox locked Marilyn into “dumb blonde” roles, a decorative foil who stirs trouble in couples. But already, the actress slipped something else into them. Her early-1950s appearances are brief, yet she composes. Creepy babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock, cartoonish figure with the Marx Brothers. In The Asphalt Jungle, by John Huston, she displays a wider palette than many male supporting roles. The cliché of the airhead holds, but it cracks in places. You still have to want to see it.
An Actress At Work
This is the exhibition’s most valuable contribution: it forces us to watch Marilyn act. Niagara, by Henry Hathaway, crowned her femme fatale in February 1953. This low-budget film grossed more than six million dollars, for a cost of $1.25 million. The New York Times noted that “the falls and Miss Monroe are worth the trip.” The phrase, condescending, says a lot about the times.
Then come the great comedies, where her craft is revealed. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Howard Hawks, then How to Marry a Millionaire. Then The Seven Year Itch, and the white dress lifted by a subway grate. The image was reproduced so often it almost erased the film. Marilyn mastered one of the most difficult arts: comic timing. She defuses the desire she provokes with innocence played to the millimeter.
The turning point, the exhibition places in New York. In 1955, at the height of her fame, Marilyn left Hollywood. She took classes at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio and worked on her technique. To escape her image, she posed anonymously in the subway. She reportedly found, for the first time, the feeling of being accepted for herself. The press, meanwhile, sneered. She was reproached for wasting, through pretentious “intellectual efforts,” a talent claimed to be purely instinctive. The trap is perfect. Natural, she’s of no merit; hard-working, she’s ridiculous.
Facts, however, catch up with her. After Bus Stop (1956), the formidable New York Times critic Bosley Crowther capitulated. Marilyn Monroe, he wrote, “has finally revealed herself as an actress.” Director Joshua Logan compared her to Chaplin for her gift of mixing laughter and pain. Then came Some Like It Hot, by Billy Wilder (1959). This masterpiece earned her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy. Wilder, annoyed by her tardiness and forgotten lines, nevertheless paid tribute to her. Anyone, he said, can memorize lines. But it took an artist to arrive without knowing them and perform that way. Her last completed film, The Misfits (1961), was written for her by Arthur Miller. Their marriage, however, was collapsing then. Commercial failure and mixed reviews, the film has since been reassessed. Nothing of a failed career: a dense body of work, and real recognition during her lifetime.
The Businesswoman No One Expected
Here is the chapter tragic portraits always forget. In January 1955, Marilyn announced the creation of her own company. Founded with photographer Milton Greene, Marilyn Monroe Productions was majority-owned by her. The move was wildly audacious for a star under contract. She went on strike and stood up to Fox for over a year. At the end of 1955, she obtained an unprecedented contract. It granted her approval rights over her films and directors. Time magazine would describe her as a shrewd businesswoman who “brought the mighty Twentieth Century-Fox to its knees.”
Let’s be precise, because legend exaggerates quickly. Marilyn was not “the first actress to found her production company.” Since the silent era, dozens of women had preceded her, from Mary Pickford to forgotten pioneers. Her company would produce only one film, The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). But the power dynamic was real. And the cause was clear: money. The figures assembled by the exhibition are telling. On Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn earned about $18,000. Her co-star Jane Russell, better established, received $200,000. The gap remained abyssal until the end. On Something’s Got to Give, in 1962, she was paid $100,000, versus $500,000 for her male co-star. Yet she remained, for ten years, Fox’s most profitable star. Her films reportedly brought in more than $200 million. When she posed nude on that last set, it was not a whim. It was a weapon, a splashy move to regain control in the face of her dismissal. The “dumb blonde” was actually playing a game of chess.
Myths Put Under Scrutiny
Marilyn produced her myths in series. The exhibition disassembles some of them, and we continue the exercise.
The most persistent first: her alleged IQ of 168, higher than Einstein’s. Archivist Scott Fortner, who inventoried her belongings, found no test. The figure is pure fabrication. Scholar Sarah Churchwell says it bluntly: the greatest myth is that of her stupidity. Because Marilyn read. A lot. Photographer Eve Arnold saw her absorbed in Joyce’s Ulysses, which she kept in her car. At her death, her library counted more than four hundred volumes, dispersed at Christie’s in 1999. Not a performative intellectual, but a hungry autodidact.
Then comes the inevitable Kennedy chapter. The exhibition shows a replica of the flesh-colored dress sewn onto the body. It’s in that dress that Marilyn sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden. The scene took place on May 19, 1962, ten days before the president’s birthday. A label asks the right question. For any other actor, it would be a simple public show of support for a political figure. Why, with her, do we see only an overflowing love affair? The rumor of an affair, even multiple affairs, was never established. It belongs to speculation, and we will refrain from adding to it.
As for her death, on the night of August 4–5, 1962, it fuels every fantasy. The autopsy was performed by Deputy Coroner Thomas Noguchi. The coroner’s office concluded a “probable suicide” by barbiturates. In 1982, a review of the case by the Los Angeles District Attorney found no credible evidence of homicide. Some biographers argue for accidental overdose. The assassination thesis was first launched by an anti-communist activist eager to smear the Kennedy clan. Writer Norman Mailer admitted he favored the story of a woman broken by love. It sold better than an accident. The making of the myth had, as always, commercial reasons. Finally, be wary of the countless “inspirational” quotes attributed to her. The most famous one, about imperfection and madness, is a fake.
What The Exhibition Really Brings
We must measure what the hanging brings to our knowledge of the actress. The material is dense. Original costumes, Ferragamo pumps, cone bras loaned by the Decorative Arts museum. Posters from the Cinémathèque collection, a Niagara screenplay that belonged to Marilyn. Andy Warhol silkscreen, the New York Mirror front page announcing the suicide, scathing drawings by Luz. The display is rich, documented, always underpinned by a thesis. The curator relies on film historian James Naremore. She invites observing gestures, expressions, acting rapports. In short, to watch an actress compose.
One major objection can be made to the whole. To denounce the reign of the image, the exhibition lives off those images. You don’t always escape the vertigo of contemplating, again, that beautiful face. The last room, “Performer Marilyn,” accepts the paradox. It shows the persistence of the icon, from Madonna to Beyoncé, from Margot Robbie to Ryan Gosling. A triple-screen video installation closes the route: “The Night of 1000 Marilyns.” You leave wondering if you really saw Marilyn. Or only your own projections. That is, perhaps, the intended goal.
One Hundred Years: A Professional, Not A Relic
A century after her birth, Marilyn Monroe remains a trademark. Her image is managed by rights holders who monetize its use. She also remains an enigma that each era rewrites to its measure. The 1970s made her a feminist martyr. The post-#MeToo era reads her as an exploited worker and an early whistleblower. She denounced Hollywood predators and supported Ella Fitzgerald against segregated venues. All these reinterpretations say, in the end, as much about us as about her.
Marilyn’s true modernity may not be where people look. It does not lie in the white dress or the perfume. To sleep, she said, she only wore “a few drops of No. 5.” It lies elsewhere. We reduced this woman to a body. She spent her life claiming a profession. She negotiated her contracts, read, worked, fought the machine that had made her. The Cinémathèque exhibition does not resurrect another icon. It finally makes legible the stubborn professional who stood behind. That is the best way to celebrate her hundredth birthday. Stop pitying her and start taking her seriously.