Marilyn Monroe

.

(See it on Flickr)
.

Marilyn Monroe's portrait made with thousands of flat circles (each circle was placed individually on a black background). It took me almost one week of intense work... Please see 3 details below. I love Marilyn, I think she was one of the most sensual women in the world.

.

Details:
.

© 2010 - Ben Heine

Silvia Monfort

.
© 2008 - Ben Heine
.

Silvia Monfort (1923, 1991) was a French actress and theatre director. Daughter of the sculptor Charles Favre-Bertin and wife of Pierre Gruneberg, this talented actress was an undying champion of the popular theatre. She was named Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1973, Officer of Arts and Letters in 1979 and then Commander of Arts and Letters in 1983. She is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

A precocious vocation

She was born in the neighborhood of Le Marais, on Rue Elzévir, a short distance away from Rue de Thorigny, where she would set up her first theatre much later. Her family had lived in this Parisian neighborhood for seven generations. She lost her mother very early and her father put her in a boarding school. She undertook her secondary studies first at lycée Victor Hugo and then at lycée Victor Duruy. She obtained her baccalauréat at 14½ with special permission. Her father had intended for her career to be spent at the Gobelin manufactory but she preferred the theatre and took classes with Jean Hervé and Jean Valcourt. In 1939, aged 16, she met Maurice Clavel, who directed the Resistance network in Eure-et-Loir. Under the pseudonym "Sinclair" (the name of a hill that looms over Sète, Maurice Clavel's native town), she involved herself at his side and participated in the liberation of Nogent-le-Rotrou and of Chartres in 1944. She was one of the notables who welcomed General De Gaulle on the square in front of the Cathedral of Chartres. Once the war ended, she married Maurice Clavel. She was decorated with the Croix de guerre by General De Gaulle and with the Bronze Star Medal by General Patton.

Cocteau, Vilar and the TNP

In 1945, she attracted notice for her acting in a play by Federico García Lorca, La casa de Bernarda Alba. Her strange and powerful personality drew the attention of Edwige Feuillère, whose reader she became in L'Aigle à deux têtes by Jean Cocteau. The play was first presented in 1946 at the Royal Theatre of the Galeries Saint-Hubert in Bruxelles, where she met with great success. After passing through Lyon, the play had its Parisian premiere at the Théâtre Hébertot. Success followed the play all the way to a memorable performance at La Fenice in Venice, greatly contributing to establishing the renown of Silvia's talent.

Playing next in Tennessee Williams' play, Summer and Smoke, she fell in love with Léonor Fini who was then beginning as a set designer. From their friendship a pretty portrait remains: Silvia painted by Léonor (1954).

Through Clavel, she then met Jean Vilar in 1947 and took part in the great adventure that was the Théâtre National Populaire. She thus took part in the first festival d'Avignon, with The Story of Tobias and Sarah (1947). Beside Gérard Philipe, she played Chimène in Le Cid, then performed at Chaillot and subsequently on tour across Europe (1954). Next, she played with Vilar in Cinna and in The Marriage of Figaro. She thus became an emblematic figure of the TNP and of French theatre in the world.

New Wave and cinema debut

Cinema, through the intermediary of Robert Bresson, had sought her out beginning in 1943, to play in Les Anges du péché. Bresson had hired her without knowing that she was an actress, as he was looking for non-professionals for his film... In 1948, she played the role of Édith de Berg in the cinematic adaptation of L'Aigle à deux têtes by Cocteau beside Feuillère and Jean Marais.

In 1955, Agnès Varda, then a photographer at the TNP, directed her first film, one of the first belonging to the New Wave. Varda remembers Silvia Monfort in La Pointe Courte: "Curious and a pioneer by nature, she threw herself into the project with delight and discipline. I really think she was happy to fight for a cinema of the future."

Henceforth separated from Maurice Clavel, Silvia Monfort shared her life with and participated in the films of director Jean-Paul Le Chanois. Despite her having an arm in a plaster cast, he insisted that she play a Polish prisoner beside François Périer and Pierre Fresnay in a film inspired by a true story, Les Évadés. This film met with great popular success in 1955. She then played beside Jean Gabin and Nicole Courcel in Le Cas du docteur Laurent, a film advocating painless childbirth (1957), and then in an obscure film of Le Chanois dealing with parent-child relations, Par-dessus le mur (1961). In two films dealing with social conditions, she was the unforgettable Eponine of Les Misérables, alongside Gabin and Bourvil (1958), and then the Gypsy girl Myrtille in Mandrin, bandit gentilhomme beside Georges Rivière and Georges Wilson. This film wrapped up her cinematic career^[4] and her relationship with Le Chanois in 1962.

On the road

During the 1960s, Silvia Monfort was passionate about cultural decentralization and so set out on the road with Jean Danet and her Tréteaux de France. Each evening, they played under a big top in a different town. She took an active part in this experiment, seeing to it that new and contemporary plays were staged alternately with the classical repertoire. She deepened her knowledge of popular theatre and of her audience and thus acquired a mastery of travelling performances that was subsequently very useful to her. On 23 June 1965, Silvia wrote to Pierre Gruneberg: "I've convinced Danet to schedule for September a series of performances of the Prostitute and of Suddenly, Last Summer under a big top around Paris (in this way the inconvenient returning directors will be able to come see it there if they need to). Oh, I would have done what I could."

Ceaselessly taking part in theatrical performances, she wrote at least once, sometimes several times a day to her companion Pierre Gruneberg. Scribbled on tablecloth corners, on the back of theatre programs or on hotel stationery, reactions, words of love and anecdotes were strung together.

In the collection of this correspondence, Letters to Pierre, Danielle Netter, assistant director, adds: "The Tréteaux de France was an extraordinary theatrical tool that gave us the occasion to present Sophocles and other dramatic poets before the tenants of the HLM, and one evening to hear a spectator declare at the end of Electra to Silvia, It's as beautiful as a Western!, which filled our tragedienne with joy."

An eclectic tragedienne

For nearly half a century, whether with the Tréteaux, in festivals, in private theatres and later in her Carrés, Monfort explored the ancient and modern theatrical repertoires. She acted in no less than five versions of Phèdre in diffrerent theatres as well as on television. She interpreted numerous works of Racine and Corneille. She performed Sophocles' Electra in the most incongruous of places, such as the "trou des Halles" in Paris in 1970.

She acted in the plays and theatrical adaptations of Maurice Clavel, such as The Isle of Goats and The Noon Terrace. She was directed by Roger Planchon at Villeurbanne in 1959 in Love's Second Surprise and by Luchino Visconti in Paris in 1961 in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore beside Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. She made appearances in Summer and Smoke (1953) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1965) by Tennessee Williams. She incarnated the Sphinx of Cocteau's The Infernal Machine in festivals as well as on television with Claude Giraud in 1963. She was The Respectful Prostitute of Jean-Paul Sartre (1965) as well as The Duchess of Malfi beside Raf Vallone (1981).

At Carré Thorigny, she brought about the debut of Bernard Giraudeau in Tom Eyen's Why Doesn't Anna's Dress Want to Come off (1974). She was also seen in The Oresteia (1962) and The Persians of Aeschylus (1984). She incarnated the fearsome Lucrezia Borgia of Victor Hugo (1975) and Marguerite de Bourgogne of The Tower of Nesle by Alexandre Dumas, père (1986). She created an indescribable Alarica in The Evil Is Spreading (1963) and was the Maid of Jacques Audiberti (1971). She was a vibrant Ethel in a radical play helmed by Alain Decaux, The Rosenbergs Should Not Die (1968). She took on Ionesco with Jacques, or the Submission (1971). She restored Henrik Ibsen to popular favor with Philippe Lemaire in When We Dead Awaken (1976) and then with Michel Auclair in The Lady from the Sea (1977). To celebrate the centenary of Cocteau's birth, she appeared for the last time on the Vaugirard stage in a poetic and musical spectacle, The Two Ways, in 1989.

In 1972, on the occasion of the republication of her novel The Raia (Hands Full of Fingers), Silvia Monfort described her favorite roles: "Gérard Philippe, whose Chimène I was, had a habit of replying that his favorite role was his next. For me, the one that I am playing fulfills me. Imagine! What marvelous relations between an actor and his character. They see each other every day, but they also know that it's not forever, so they have to work twice as hard. Certain characters have more of an affinity for us. I have always felt myself closer to adolescents thirsting for the absolute than to women with divided hearts. I prefer Electra to Clytemnestra. I was wildly in love with Alarica from The Evil Is Spreading, Éponine from Les Misérables and recently The Maid by Audiberti. But this doesn't prevent me from knowing beautiful stories about those whom I wouldn't play. Of all the heroines, the one who perhaps excited me most was the queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea. When she thought herself defeated by Achilles, she refused to follow him into his kingdom. She wanted him to be king in her land. So she tore him up with her nails, devoured him with her teeth, and said: All women swear to their lovers: I will eat you as long as I love you – well, I did it."

A mythic Phèdre

Silvia Monfort figures among the most important performers of Phèdre. Notably, she had as a partner in the role of Theseus Jean-Claude Drouot or of course Alain Cuny in the theatre and in a televised version in 1982.

A study by the CNRS about the great tragediennes who have incarnated this character in the 20th century was published in Pour la Science, the French version of Scientific American. This study analyzed the relationship between the pauses and the versified text as well as the fluctuations in delivery and demonstrated that Silvia Monfort made the most important use of them (92% of pauses and 3.8 syllables/minute) in relation to other tragic actresses (Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Bell, Nada Strancar and Natacha Amal); this characteristic of her acting contributed to give Silvia Monfort's interpretation an exceptional quality of psychological depth and emotion which made a success out of her.

She herself said of her character in 1973: "Phèdre burns in each one of us. We have hardly grasped the image in the mirror when she dims, and the imminence of this obliteration sharpens the acuteness of the reflection […] What matters is that there has been a meeting in mystery even from the first reading. It is like desire, or rather it is present in the look that provokes it, or rather there will never be unison. All the opinions, competent, imperious, singular, that were offered to me on the subject of Phèdre, and to which I listened intensely, had no other result with me than to lead me back to my Phèdre, despite her long being hazy, with the obviousness of a pawn moving back to the first square on a board game […] this is the wonder of Phèdre: to tackle it is to resign oneself to it."

The fall that made her an author

In 1946, her first novel appeared. She later explained that what had determined her to write was her seven-meter fall through the glass roof of the Studio des Champs-Élysées. She played in Federico Garcia Lorca's La casa de Bernarda Alba and Maurice Clavel, disdaining her philosophy books, wrote for her first play, The Love Letters. :

"The day when I was to abandon one play for the other, my colleagues from the Studio offered me champagne on the roof of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. I had never drunk wine or champagne. I passed through a skylight and found myself in the hospital, my head shattered. Three weeks in a coma, during which Maurice's play was prepared without me.
When I was back on my feet, sad and without a role to play, I sat down at my work table. Without this accident, maybe I would never have taken the time to write. For later, in order to write, I had to take away time from the theatre."

When a journalist asked her why the actress which she had never ceased to be had never been tempted to write a play, or a film script, she replied: "Writing for the theatre is a very special gift. Even some great novelists don't have it. The dramatic author breathes into his characters a life that he doesn't control.

But what interests me above all in writing is analysis. To know, to explain the reason for things, to follow step by step the actions of my characters. And then, I couldn't stand seeing them with another face than that which I had in my mind!"

"This will be my theatre!"

In 1972, with the support of Jacques Duhamel, then Minister of Cultural Affairs, she set up and directed the Carré Thorigny in the neighborhood of Le Marais in Paris, where she put on innovative multidisciplinary shows. She was especially interested in the circus world and organized an exhibit entitled Circus in color which met with enormous success. Following her contacts with circus people and her meeting with Alexis Gruss, she organized old-style circus performances in the courtyard of the Hôtel Salé, located in front of the Carré. The public's fancy led Monfort and Gruss to set up (in 1974) the first circus and mime's school in France, L'école au Carré, which they directed together. They wanted to highlight the nobility of the circus's origins and were involved in bringing to life an updated old-style circus. The Gruss circus followed Monfort in her successive moves until it became a national circus in 1982.

It was at the Carré Thorigny that Alain Decaux awarded Silvia Monfort the Legion of Honor in 1973 while paying homage to "her passion for the theatre and the inflexible will with which she serves it."

The Carré had to leave Rue de Thorigny in 1974 because of a property transaction. Monfort thus transferred her Nouveau Carré into the old théâtre de la Gaîté-Lyrique which opened on 1 October 1974 and set up the Gruss circus in the square in front of the theatre. The hall was inaccessible for safety reasons, so the new Carré put actors and audiences on stage, but because of the building's great age and while awaiting its renovation, she was forced to set up her stage under a big top in the Jardin d'Acclimatation from 1978 to 1979. She then had to move her big top onto the site of the former abattoirs of Vaugirard. There, she actually set up two big tops, one for theatre and one for the circus. Nevertheless, lacking funds, the project of renovating the Gaîté-Lyrique was abandoned.

Yet she never stopped working to establish a Nouveau Carré at Vaugirard on the site of and in place of the big tops. The decision to build the theatre such as it is today was taken in 1986. On 7 March 1989, she wrote: "This will be my theatre. Even so, incredible! I don't know a single living person for whom his own theatre was built, with his name and of the right size." But she died a few months before its completion. Inaugurated in 1992, it bears her name: Théâtre Silvia-Monfort.

During the last years of their time together, Silvia Monfort and Pierre Gruneberg were constantly apart. In winter, as a ski coach, he had to stay at Courchevel, while she worked at Paris, then during the festival period he worked at Cap Ferrat as a swimming instructor, whereas Silvia Monfort's ill health obliged her to pass the summer at Courchevel, alone.

She died on 30 March 1991 of lung cancer.

The Silvia Monfort Prize

Pierre Gruneberg, who became Silvia Monfort's lover in 1963 and married her on 24 May 1990, founded the Silvia Monfort Prize Association in 1996, carrying to completion an idea that Monfort did not have time to put into material form. This prize is issued every two years to a young tragic actress by a professional jury. Since its inception, the prizewinners have been:

1. Smadi Wolfman (1996)
2. Rachida Brakni (1998)
3. Mona Abdel Hadi (2000)
4. Isabelle Joly (2002)
5. Marion Bottolier (2004)
6. Gina Ndjemba (2006)

The Prix Silvia Monfort 2006 was awarded on 22 May to Gina Ndjemba, aged 21, a first-year student at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique, for her interpretation of the role of Camille in Horace by Corneille. This sixth Prix Silvia Monfort ceremony took place at the celebrated tragedienne's theatre in the presence of the academician Alain Decaux, a great friend of Silvia Monfort, to whom he paid a moving homage. This Prize was accompanied by a €4,600 award.

Quotations about her

Jean Cocteau :

"Silvia Monfort possesses an exquisite waist, like that of an hourglass, and the golden sand from up top flows toward the bottom, toward her belly, whence all great actresses draw their genius.

I have known several Silvia Monforts. One, with a wreath of wheat in her hair, entered free Paris as a young leader of the Resistance. Another had written a book of the first rank; a third – and my eye had not yet linked them – came and presented herself at the Théâtre Hébertot to play the role of Mademoiselle de Berg in L’Aigle à deux têtes. She played it and it was only later, a long time later, when all these Silvia Monforts became just one, to whom I address my tender gratitude.

Here she is on her successful voyage, the voyage from role to role, from book to book, the voyage on board which I wave the handkerchief of friendship as a sign of loyal affection and good luck."

Juliette Gréco :

"Silvia Monfort came back from a solitary walk and held out a flower to her husband Clavel, saying in her husky voice: 'I've stolen this flower for you on the mountain...' Jujube was stunned and the exotic Ophelia disappeared under the arches that surrounded the swimming pool."

L'Humanité (following her death) :

"She was a grande dame of the theatre and of the city. We will remember her beautiful tragedienne's voice and her determined wish to make a different theatre, her theatre, in the modernity of the ancients and of the classics. Let us hope that that which will be born and bear her name in the heart of Paris will prolong her memory, the fervor of her art and the exacting purity of her work."
.

.

>>> Read more about Silvia Monfort (Filmography, Theatre and Television references…) on Wikipedia

.
----------------

--> The above biography was initially written in French by Airair and appeared on Wikipedia in French and in English

.

.

Marilyn Monroe, 45 Years Later

.

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

.

The 45th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe passed without any any fanfare or commemoration.... almost as if she never existed.

To my generation she did.... she was admired, loved and pitied. Admired for literally rising to fame from a totally impoverished and miserable childhood, loved for her charm and beauty, and pitied because of the exploitation the evil system put her through.

A victim in the truest sense of the word. Victimised by the industry she was a part of, by the press and finally by her murder. She was about to go public with the fact that both John and Bobby Kennedy had been her lovers. Since Robert was getting ready to succeed his brother to the White House, that was a threat that could not be allowed to stand. She is remembered.... she is still loved.... and she is definitely missed.

Following is the last interview she gave...
.

Marylin Monroe's Last Interview
.
By Richard Meryman 1962

.

Sometimes wearing a scarf and a polo coat and no make up and with a certain attitude of walking, I go shopping or just looking at people living. But then you know,there will be a few teenagers who are kind of sharp and they'll say, "Hey, just a minute. You know who I think that is?" And they'll start tailing me. And I don't mind. I realize some people want to see if you're real.The teenagers, the little kids, their faces light up. They say, "Gee," and they can't wait to tell their friends. And old people come up and say, "Wait till I tell my wife." You've changed their whole day. In the morning, the garbage men that go by 57th Street when I come out the door say, "Marilyn, hi! How do you feel this morning?"

To me, it's an honor, and I love them for it. The working men, I'll go by and they'll whistle. At first they whistle because they think, oh, it's a girl. She's got blond hair and she's not out of shape, and then they say, "Gosh,it's Marilyn Monroe!" And that has it's, you know, those are times it's nice. People knowing who you are and all of that, and feeling that you've meant something to them.

I don't know quite why, but somehow I feel they know that I mean what I do, both when I'm acting on the screen or when if I see them in person and greet them. That I really always do mean hello, and how are you? In their fantasies they feel "Gee,it can happen to me!"

But when you're famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature and it won't hurt your feelings. Like it's happening to your clothing. One time here I am looking for a home to buy and I stopped at this place. A man came out and was very pleasant and cheerful, and said, "Oh, just a moment, I want my wife to meet you." Well,she came out and said, "Will you please get off the premises?" You're always running into peoples unconscious. Let's take some actors or directors. Usually they don't say it to me, they say it to the newspapers because that's a bigger play.

You know, if they're only insulting me to my face that doesn't make a big enough play because all I have to say is, "See you around, like never." But if it's in the newspapers, it's coast to coast and all around the world. I don't understand why people aren't a little more generous with each other. I don't like to say this, but I'm afraid there is alot of envy in this business. The only thing I can do is stop and think, "I'm all right but I'm not so sure about them!" For instance, you've read there was some actor that once said that kissing me was like kissing Hitler. Well, I think that's his problem. If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has these kinds of feelings toward me, then my fantasy can come into play. In other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.

But one thing about fame is the bigger the people are, the simpler they are, the more they are not awed by you! They don't feel they have to be offensive, they don't feel they have to insult you. You can meet Carl Sandburg and he is so pleased to meet you. He wants to know about you, and you want to know about him. Not in any way has he ever let me down. Or else you can meet working people who want to know what it is like. You try to explain to them. I don't like to disillusion them and tell them it's sometimes nearly impossible. They kind of look toward you for something that's away from their everyday life.

I guess you call that entertainment, a world to escape into, a fantasy. Sometimes it makes you a little bit sad because you'd like to meet somebody kind of on face value. It's nice to be included in peoples fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake. I don't look at myself as a commodity, but I'm sure alot of people have. Including, well, one corporation in particular which shall be nameless. If I'm sounding picked on or something, I think I am. I'll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do alot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it's disappointing. These are the ones you aren't interested in seeing everyday of your life.

Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I'm invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who'll play the piano after dinner, and I know you're not really invited for yourself. You're just an ornament.

When I was 5 I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries. It goes beyond house, you could make your own situations and you could pretend, and even if the other kids were a little slow on the imagining part you could say, "Hey, what about if you were such and such, and I were such and such wouldn't that be fun?" And they'd say, "Oh, yes," and then I'd say, "Well, that will be a horse and this will be..."it was play, playfulness.

When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be. You can play. But then you grow up and find out about playing, that they make playing very difficult for you. Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either. When I was 11, the whole world which was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world. Suddenly, everything opened up.

Even the girls paid a little attention to me because they thought, "Hmmm, she's to be dealt with!" And I had this long walk to school 2 1/2 miles to school, 2 1/2 miles back. It was just sheer pleasure. Every fellow honked his horn you know, workers driving to work, waving, you know, and I'd wave back. The world became friendly. All the newspaper boys when they delivered the paper would come around to where I lived, and I used to hang from the limb of a tree, and I had sort of a sweatshirt on. I didn't realize the value of a sweatshirt in those days, and then I was sort of beginning to catch on, but I didn't quite get it, because I couldn't really afford sweaters.

But here they come with their bicycles, you know, and I'd get these free papers and the family liked that, and they'd all pull their bicycles up around the tree and then I'd be hanging, looking kind of like a monkey, I guess. I was a little shy to come down. I did get down to the curb, kinda kicking the curb and kicking the leaves and talking, but mostly listening. And sometimes the family used to worry because I used to laugh so loud and so gay; I guess they felt it was hysterical. It was just this sudden freedom because I would ask the boys, "Can I ride your bike now?" and they'd say, "Sure." Then I'd go zooming, laughing in the wind, riding down the block, laughing, and they'd all stand around and wait till I came back, but I loved the wind. It caressed me. But it was kind of a double edged thing. I did find too, when the world opened up that people took alot for granted, like not only could they be friendly, but they could suddenly get overly friendly and expect an awful lot for very little. When I was older, I used to go to Grauman's Chinese Theater and try to fit my foot in the prints in the cement there. And I'd say, "Oh, oh, my foot's too big! I guess that's out." I did have a funny feeling later when I finally put my foot down into that wet cement.

I sure knew what it really meant to me. Anything's possible, almost. It was the creative part that kept me going, trying to be an actress. I enjoy acting when you really hit it right. And I guess I've always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife. Well, also, I had to eat. I was never kept, to be blunt about it. I always kept myself. I have always had a pride in the fact that I was my own. And Los Angeles was my home, too, so when they said, "Go home!" I said, "I am home." The time I sort of began to think I was famous, I was driving somebody to the airport, and as I came back there was this movie house and I saw my name in lights. I pulled the car up at a distance down the street, it was too much to take up close, you know, all of a sudden. And I said, "God, somebody's made a mistake." But there it was, in lights. And I sat there and said, "So that's the way it looks," and it was all very strange to me, and yet at the studio they had said, "Remember you're not a star."

Yet there it is up in lights. I really got the idea I must be a star, or something from the newspapermen, I'm saying men, not the women who would interview me and they would be warm and friendly. By the way, that part of the press, you know, the men of the press, unless they have their own personal quirks against me, they were always very warm and friendly and they'd say, "You know, you're the only star," and I'd say, "Star?" and they'd look at me as if I were nuts. I think they, in their own kind of way, made me realize I was famous.

I remember when I got the part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane Russell, she was the brunette in it and I was the blonde. She got $200,000 for it, and I got my $500 a week, but that to me was ,you know, considerable. She by the way, was quite wonderful to me. The only thing was I couldn't get a dressing room. I said, finally, I really got to this kind of level, I said, "Look, after all, I am the blonde, and it is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!" Because still they always kept saying, "Remember, you're not a star." I said, "Well, whatever I am, I am the blonde!" And I want to say the people, if I am a star, the people made me a star. No studio, no person, but the people did.

There was a reaction that came to the studio, the fan mail, or when I went to a premiere, or the exhibitors wanted to meet me. I didn't know why. When they all rushed toward me I looked behind me to see who was there and I said, "My heavens!" I was scared to death. I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody. I don't know who or what, maybe myself. I've always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, "Hi," that the people ought to get their money's worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me. I do have feelings some days when there are scenes with alot of responsibility toward the meaning, and I'll wish, "Gee, if only I had been a cleaning woman." On the way to the studio I would see somebody cleaning and I'd say, "That's what I'd like to be. That's my ambition in life." But I think that all actors go through this.

We not only want to be good, we have to be. You know, when they talk about nervousness, my teacher, Lee Strasberg, when I said to him, "I don't know what's wrong with me but I'm a little nervous," he said, "When you're not, give up, because nervousness indicates sensitivity." Also, a struggle with shyness is in every actor more than anyone can imagine. There is a censor inside us that says to what degree do we let go, like a child playing.

I guess people think we just go out there, and you know, that's all we do. Just do it. But it's a real struggle. I'm one of the world's most self conscious people. I really have to struggle. An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are. Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever. Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, "One tear, right now," that one tear would pop out. But once there came two tears because I thought, "How dare he?" Goethe said, "Talent is developed in privacy," you know? And it's really true.

There is a need for aloneness which I don't think most people realize for an actor. It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like sort of a chunk of you. They kind of like to take pieces out of you. I don't think they realize it, but it's like "rrr do this, rrr do that." But you do want to stay intact. Intact and on two feet.

I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated. This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. Like you don't dare get a cold. How dare you get a cold! I mean, the executives can get colds and stay home forever and phone it in, but how dare you, the actor, get a cold or a virus. You know, no one feels worse than the one who's sick. I sometimes wish, gee, I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection. I am not an actress who appears at a studio just for the purpose of discipline. This doesn't have anything at all to do with art.

I myself would like to become more disciplined within my work. But I'm there to give a performance and not to be disciplined by a studio! After all, I'm not in a military school. This is supposed to be an art form, not just a manufacturing establishment. The sensitivity that helps me to act, you see, also makes me react. An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin? If you've noticed in Hollywood where millions and billions of dollars have been made, there aren't really any kind of monuments or museums, and I don't call putting your footprint in Grauman's Chinese a monument, all right this did mean a lot, sentimentally at the time.

Gee, nobody left anything behind, they took it, they grabbed it and they ran, the ones who made the billions of dollars, never the workers. You know alot of people have, oh gee, real quirky problems that they wouldn't dare have anyone know. But one of my problems happens to show, I'm late. I guess people think that why I'm late is some kind of arrogance and I think it is opposite of arrogance. I also feel that I'm not in this big American rush, you know, you got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason.

The main thing is, I want to be prepared when I get there to give a good performance or whatever to the best of my ability. A lot of people can be there on time and do nothing, which I have seen them do, and you know, all sit around and sort of chit chatting and talking trivia about their social life. Gable said about me, "When she's there, she's there. All of her is there! She's there to work." I was honored when they asked me to appear at the President's birthday rally in Madison Square Garden.

There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing Happy Birthday, like if I had been wearing a slip I would have thought it was showing, or something. I thought, "Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!" A hush like that from the people warms me. It's sort of like an embrace. Then you think, by God, I'll sing this song if it's the last thing I ever do. And for all the people. Because I remember when I turned to the microphone I looked all the way up and back, and I thought, "That's where I'd be, way up there under one of those rafters, close to the ceiling, after I paid my $2 to come into the place." Afterwards they had some sort of reception. I was with my former father-in-law, Isadore Miller, so I think I did something wrong when I met the President. Instead of saying, "How do you do?" I just said "This is my former father-in-law, Isadore Miller."

He came here an immigrant and I thought this would be one of the biggest things in his life, he's about 75 or 80 years old and I thought this would be something that he would be telling his grandchildren about and all that. I should have said, "How do you do, Mr.President," but I had already done the singing, so well you know. I guess nobody noticed it. Fame has a special burden, which I might as well state here and now.

I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. But what goes with it can be a burden. Like the man was going to show me around but the woman said, "Off the premises." I feel that beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour, it's based on femininity. I think that sexuality is only attractive when it's natural and spontaneous. This is where alot of them miss the boat. And then something I'd just like to spout off on.

We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything. I never quite understood it, this sex symbol. I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something I'd rather have it sex than some other things they've got symbols of! These girls who try to be me, I guess the studios put them up to it, or they get the ideas themselves. But gee, they haven't got it. Y

ou can make alot of gags about it like they haven't got the foreground or else they haven't the background. But I mean the middle, where you live. All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me and I'd worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them, don't hide these things from me. I'd rather you ask me these things straight out and I'll answer all your questions. Don't be afraid to ask anything. After all, I have come up from way down.

I wanted them to know of life other than their own. I used to tell them, for instance, that I worked for 5 cents a month and I washed one hundred dishes, and my step kids would say, "One hundred dishes!" and I said, "Not only that, I scraped and cleaned them before I washed them. I washed them and rinsed them and put them in the draining place, but I said, "Thank God I didn't have to dry them." Kids are different from grown ups. You know when you get grown up you can get kind of sour, I mean that's the way it can go, but kid's accept you the way you are. Fame to me certainly is only a temporary and a partial happiness, even for a waif and I was brought up a waif. But fame is not really for a daily diet, that's not what fulfills you.

It warms you a bit but the warming is temporary. It's like caviar, you know, it's good to have caviar but not when you have it every meal every day. I was never used to being happy, so that wasn't something I ever took for granted. I did sort of think, you know, marriage did that. You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy. That's it, successful, happy, and on time. Yet because of fame I was able to meet and marry two of the nicest men I'd ever met up to that time.

I don't think people will turn against me, at least not by themselves. I like people. The "public" scares me but people I trust. Maybe they can be impressed by the press or when a studio starts sending out all kinds of stories. But I think when people go to see a movie, they judge for themselves. We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves. Once I was supposed to be finished, that was the end of me.

When Mr. Miller was on trial for contempt of Congress, a certain corporation executive said either he named names and I got him to name names, or I was finished. I said, "I'm proud of my husband's position and I stand behind him all the way," and the court did too. "Finished," they said. "You'll never be heard of." It might be a kind of relief to be finished. It's sort of like, I don't know, what kind of a yard dash you're running, but then you're at the finish line and you sort of see you've made it! But you never have. You have to start all over again.

But I believe you're always as good as your potential. I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by and, so long, I've had you fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.Source

And below is her obituary that appeared in the New York Times on August 6 1962...
.

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

.

Brilliant Stardom and Personal Tragedy

Punctuated the Life of Marilyn Monroe
.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

.

The life of Marilyn Monroe, the golden girl of the movies, ended as it began, in misery and tragedy. Her death at the age of 36 closed an incredibly glamorous career and capped a series of somber events that began with her birth as an unwanted, illegitimate baby and went on and on, illuminated during the last dozen years by the lightning of fame.

Her public life was in dazzling contrast to her private life. The first man to see her on the screen, the man who made her screen test, felt the almost universal reaction as he ran the wordless scene. In it, she walked, sat down and lit a cigarette.

Recalled 'Lush Stars'

"I got a cold chill," he said. "This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures. This is the first girl who looked like one of those lush stars of the silent era. Every frame of the test radiated sex." Billy Wilder, the director, called it "flesh impact."

"Flesh impact is rare," he said. "Three I remember who had it were Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Rita Hayworth. Such girls have flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it."

Fans paid $200,000,000 to see her project this quality. No sex symbol of the era other than Brigitte Bardot could match her popularity. Toward the end, she also convinced critics and the public that she could act.

During the years of her greatest success, she saw two of her marriages end in divorce. She suffered at least two miscarriages and was never able to have a child. Her emotional insecurity deepened; her many illnesses came upon her more frequently.

Dismissed From Picture

In 1961, she was twice admitted to hospitals in New York for psychiatric observation and rest. She was dismissed in June by Twentieth Century-Fox after being absent all but five days during seven weeks of shooting "Something's Got to Give."

"It's something that Marilyn no longer can control," one of her studio chiefs confided. "Sure she's sick. She believes she's sick. She may even have a fever, but it's a sickness of the mind. Only a psychiatrist can help her now."

In her last interview, published in the Aug. 3 issue of Life magazine, she told Richard Meryman, an associate editor: "I was never used to being happy, so that wasn't something I ever took for granted." Considering her background, this was a statement of exquisite restraint.

She was born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. The name on the birth record is Norma Jean Mortenson, the surname of the man who fathered her, then abandoned her mother. She later took her mother's last name, Baker.

Family Tragedies

Both her maternal grandparents and her mother were committed to mental institutions. Her uncle killed himself. Her father died in a motorcycle accident three years after her birth. Her childhood has been described as "Oliver Twist in girl's clothing."

During her mother's stays in asylums, she was farmed out to twelve sets of foster parents. Two families were religious fanatics; one gave her empty whisky bottles to play with instead of dolls.

At another stage, she lived in a drought area with a family of seven. She spent two years in a Los Angeles orphanage, wearing a uniform she detested. By the time she was 9 years old, Norma Jean had begun to stammer--an affliction rare among females.

Her dream since childhood had been to be a movie star, and she succeeded beyond her wildest imaginings. The conviction of her mother's best friend was borne out; she had told the little girl, day after day: "Don't worry. You're going to be a beautiful girl when you get big. You're going to be a movie star. Oh, I feel it in my bones."

Nunnally Johnson, the producer and writer, understood that Miss Monroe was something special. Marilyn, he said, was "a phenomenon of nature, like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. "You can't talk to it. It can't talk to you. All you can do is stand back and be awed by it," he said.

This figure in the minds of millions was difficult to analyze statistically. Her dimensions--37-23- 37--were voluptuous but not extraordinary. She stood 5 feet 5 1/2 inches tall. She had soft blonde hair, wide, dreamy, gray-blue eyes. She spoke in a high baby voice that was little more than a breathless whisper.

Heavy Fan Mail

Fans wrote her 5,000 letters a week, at least a dozen of them proposing marriage. The Communists denounced her as a capitalist trick to make the American people forget how miserable they were. In Turkey a young man took leave of his senses while watching "How to Marry a Millionaire" and slashed his wrists.

There were other symbols of success. She married two American male idols--one an athlete, one an intellectual. Her second husband was Joe DiMaggio, the baseball player. Her third and last was the Pulitzer- Prize winning playwright, Arthur Miller.

She was 16 when she married for the first time. The bridegroom was James Dougherty, 21, an aircraft worker. Mr. Dougherty said after their divorce four years later, in 1946, that she had been a "wonderful" housekeeper.

Her two successive divorces came in 1954, when she split with Mr. DiMaggio after only nine months, and in 1960, after a four-year marriage to Mr. Miller. She became famous with her first featured role of any prominence in "The Asphalt Jungle," issued in 1950.

Her appearance was brief but unforgettable. From the instant she moved onto the screen with that extraordinary walk of hers, people asked themselves: "Who's that blonde?" In 1952 it was revealed that Miss Monroe had been the subject of a widely distributed nude calendar photograph shot while she was a notably unsuccessful starlet.

Revealed Her Wit

It created a scandal, but it was her reaction to the scandal that was remembered. She told interviewers that she was not ashamed and had needed the money to pay her rent. She also revealed her sense of humor. When asked by a woman journalist, "You mean you didn't have anything on?" she replied breathlessly: "Oh yes, I had the radio on."

One of her most exasperating quirks was her tardiness. She was, during the years of her fame, anywhere from one to twenty-four hours late for appointments. Until lately, she managed to get away with it. Her dilatory nature and sicknesses added nearly $1,000,000 to the budget of "Let's Make Love." The late Jerry Wald, head of her studio, simply commented:

"True, she's not punctual. She can't help it, but I'm not sad about it," he said, "I can get a dozen beautiful blondes who will show up promptly in make-up at 4 A.M. each morning, but they are not Marilyn Monroe."

The tardiness, the lack of responsibility and the fears began to show more and more through the glamorous patina as Miss Monroe's career waxed. Speaking of her career and her fame in the Life interview, she said, wistfully:

"It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It's sort of like I don't know what kind of a yard dash you're running, but then you're at the finish line and you sort of sigh--you've made it! But you never have--you have to start all over again."
.