System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Marilyn Monroe, Actress
June 01, 1926 - August 05, 1962
Born Norma Jean Mortenson, on June 1st 1926, in Los Angeles, one of the greatest stars was born. Marilyn life however was not always a bed of roses, for a great part of her childhood she spent her time in foster homes and an orphanage. Marilyn’s father abandoned her, while her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, had to work and later was placed in a mental institution. It was at the age of 16 when Marilyn began to use her mother’s last name, as she was not able to confirm that Mortenson was her father’s last name.
Not long after at the age of sixteen she married James Dougherty, who was an aircraft factory worker but when he went of to serve over seas as a merchant marine, she took up a job in a target airplane factory. When Marilyn was asked to model for an illustrated article in the Yank Magazine, she quit her job to become a full-time model and later divorced Dougherty, when she finally decided to move to Hollywood to become an actress in 1946.
She was soon signed by Twentieth-Century Fox, were she officially changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Over the next few years she had only minor roles in several movies; and during a period of unemployment she posed nude for a pin-up calendar that would later become a collector’s item. It was not until her small roles in two 1950 movies: The asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, that her career took off, and she was promoted as a slightly ditzy blonde exuding a breathless sexuality, where she became the star and celebrity we all know. As her career took off her love life once more did too marrying the former baseball star Joe DiMaggio for about nine months in 1954. Marilyn loved stardom but hated that it was because of her sex symbol status, so she decided o study at the Lee and Paula Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York.
Marilyn gave to of her more sophisticated performances in “Bus Stop” in 1956 and “Some like it Hot” in 1959. She married the playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote “the Death of a Salesman” and she stared in a movie he wrote for her called “the Misfits” in 1961. Not long after filming “the Misfits” she divorced Miller in 1961. Marilyn’s life could have been compared to that of a roller coaster as she was briefly hospitalized in a mental clinic, she was dropped from a movie for failure to show up on time and she was taking drugs for her various problems.
It was on August 5th, 1962, when Monroe was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates in her home in Los Angeles. She had been working on her last film; “Something’s got to give”. After several years of discussed almost entirely in terms of a sex goddess, she came to be perceived as a symbol of the exploitation of women in Hollywood, and men in general. In recent years Monroe has been recognized as one of the 20th century’s top entertainers.
