Marilyn at 100

One hundred years of Norma Jeane.

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles, Marilyn's beginnings were anything but the gilded story the world would later attach to her. She grew up between foster homes and an orphanage. By sixteen she had married a neighbour to avoid being returned to the system. A factory floor and a wartime photographer's lens, almost by accident, are what changed her life.

By the early 1950s she was Marilyn Monroe — the platinum hair, the breath, the small mole — and Hollywood had a star it didn't quite know what to do with. She made Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, The Misfits. She founded her own production company — extraordinarily bold for a woman in 1950s Hollywood — and studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio when the industry was telling her she was a face, not an actress.

She was also, almost always, photographed. By Eve Arnold on the dunes of Long Island in 1955, reading Ulysses. By Milton H. Greene in white robes at the Schenck mansion. By Douglas Kirkland the night she wore nothing but a white silk sheet for Look magazine. By Bert Stern, days before her death, in what became known as The Last Sitting. The photographers loved her because she was generous to the camera in a way few of her peers were — playful, melancholy, intelligent, completely awake.