The title of the exhibition the National Portrait Gallery in London is devoting to Marilyn Monroe until September 6, 2026, to mark the centenary of the Hollywood star’s birth – Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait – is, in its own way, misleading and almost ironic.
Marilyn was arguably the most photographed woman of her age. Her image has been consumed, commodified and reproduced almost beyond endurance, both during her lifetime and after her death. To suggest that she can be encapsulated into a single portrait strikes me as the most absurd of heresies.
Perhaps unintentionally, the exhibition does precisely the opposite. It reveals the countless facets of a flesh-and-blood woman who coexisted with a meticulously manufactured public persona, while remaining haunted throughout her life by the elusive question of identity.
The woman of flesh and blood was called Norma Jeane.
Her childhood was shaped by abandonment and instability. Her mother, plagued by severe mental illness, was repeatedly institutionalised, leaving Norma Jeane to drift from foster homes to orphanages and temporary guardians, never knowing the security of a stable family or the certainty of unconditional affection.
Identity – or rather, the absence of it – defined her story from the very beginning.
She never knew her biological father. Stanley Gifford refused, until the day he died, to acknowledge any relationship whatsoever with either Marilyn or her mother, Gladys.
Instead, the name of one of Gladys’s former husbands appeared on her birth certificate – misspelled, no less, as “Mortenson” instead of “Mortensen”. Before long she would adopt the surname of her stepfather, John Baker, who would himself soon vanish from her life.
Those formative years, marked by abandonment, insecurity, rootlessness and perpetual upheaval, left an indelible imprint on her psyche.
Her first professional photograph was taken in 1945 at the munitions factory where she was contributing to the American war effort. It was shot by US Army photographer David Conover and published in Yank magazine. She appeared under the name Norma Jeane Dougherty – the surname of the man she had married shortly before her sixteenth birthday. He, too, would soon vanish from her life.
David Conover
She turned to modelling, quickly appearing on the covers of some thirty pin-up magazines.
In 1946 she met the Hungarian-born photographer André de Dienes, whose camera captured an extraordinary series of candid portraits that still rank among the most revealing ever taken of her.
Andre de Dienes
She gradually lightened and straightened her hair. Determined to become an actress, she divorced and reinvented herself. The metamorphosis was completed in 1950 with rhinoplasty and chin surgery. Marilyn Monroe was born, and her meteoric ascent was accompanied by an almost uninterrupted succession of photographic sittings.
Richard Avedon, Milton Greene, Eve Arnold, Cecil Beaton and many others each revealed a different Marilyn: mischievous, luminous, sensual, but equally thoughtful, introspective, dreamy or quietly melancholic.
Cecil Beaton
Milton Greene
Jack Cardiff
Douglas Kirkland
Backstage
Eve Arnold
Philippe Halsman
Sam Shaw
Misconception accompanied her at every step.
Reduced to the status of a cinematic pin-up, she was in reality a voracious reader who studied literature and art, took singing lessons and travelled across America to train at the Actors Studio.
Eve Arnold
Hypersexualised by the male gaze, what she craved above all was unconditional love.
With Arthur Miller, her third husband
Dismissed by many as a “dumb blonde”, she rebelled against Hollywood’s suffocating studio system and established her own production company. Eventually imprisoned by the ravenous public persona she herself had created, she escaped to New York, living anonymously, stripped of make-up and glamour, under the name Zelda Zonk.
Once again, identity.
Marilyn was a kaleidoscope. Everyone saw only the version they wished to see.
And yet, for anyone prepared to look beyond the surface, the fracture is never far away.
The portraits brought together by the National Portrait Gallery constantly oscillate between exuberance and sorrow. The smiles are incandescent. The laughter feels entirely spontaneous. The power of seduction remains intoxicating. Yet some of the photographs suggest a permanent doubt, an immeasurable loneliness and a deep sadness. At times her gaze drifts beyond the edge of the frame, at others, a fleeting sense of bewilderment rises almost imperceptibly beneath the polished mask of the public Marilyn – or we witness one of those stolen moments before the mask has had time to slip back into place.
Milton Greene
Eve Arnold
It is this constant movement between radiance and vulnerability that gives the exhibition its unexpected emotional depth.
Visitors undoubtedly come to encounter one of cinema’s greatest legends. What they leave with, however, is something altogether more moving: the impression of a woman searching for herself in a world captivated by her appearance.
Milton Greene
Leaving the National Portrait Gallery, one carries away far more than the memory of a universally recognised icon. One remembers instead a woman of infinite complexity, whose almost blinding brilliance could never quite conceal the immense shadows that lay beneath.
July 17, 2026
