By Lana Sterling
On 1 June 1926, Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles. A hundred years later, the world she left behind at thirty-six is still trying to figure her out. The sheer scale of the 2026 centennial – museum blockbusters, auction house circuses, a Guinness World Record attempt in the California desert – tells us something important, and it is not merely that people still like the photographs. Marilyn Monroe remains a live wire in the culture because she posed a question the entertainment industry has never satisfactorily answered: what happens when a woman decides to own herself?
Across London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Palm Springs, a constellation of exhibitions and events has converged on the centenary of Monroe’s birth. What emerges is not a shrine but an argument – that the woman routinely reduced to a breathy voice and a platinum wig was in fact a shrewd operator who understood image, leverage, and power better than most of the men who tried to control her.
The Summer of Marilyn
London has branded the season “the summer of Marilyn,” and the title is not hyperbole. At the National Portrait Gallery, which opened on 4 June, curator Rosie Broadley has assembled portraits by Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Cecil Beaton, Pauline Boty, and Marlene Dumas, alongside Monroe’s own personal effects – books, scripts, clothing – that reveal the private architecture of a public persona.
“I’d love visitors to see what a creative force Marilyn was – as an architect of her own image, a collaborator with photographers, and a pioneer starting her own production company,” Broadley told the gallery’s press office. The exhibition includes previously unseen photographs taken by Allan Grant at Monroe’s Brentwood home the day before her death in August 1962, images originally commissioned for Life magazine.
Simultaneously, the British Film Institute at Southbank has launched Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star, a two-month retrospective running through the end of July. Programmer Kimberley Sheehan has organised the season into three strands – Star Attractions, Dramatic Turns, and Scene Stealers – and has paired screenings with a UK theatrical re-release of The Misfits (1961), Monroe’s final completed film, written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston.
“Monroe was quite possibly the biggest star cinema ever saw and will ever see,” Sheehan said. “She was the original triple threat and deserves much credit for crafting her own image and stardom.”
The BFI’s framing is deliberate. Rather than treating Monroe as a static icon to be venerated from a distance, the programme asks audiences to engage with the films themselves – from the sharp comic timing of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the bruised emotional register of Bus Stop – and to reckon with the gap between the woman and the myth.
What the Academy Museum Found
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles has mounted what may be the centennial’s definitive institutional statement. Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, which opened on 31 May and runs through February 2027, presents hundreds of original objects: production documents, marked-up scripts, personal letters, and – most strikingly – the rarely exhibited hot pink Travilla gown from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
The Academy has described Monroe as a “visionary actor and image-maker,” a deliberate elevation of language that positions her not as a passive subject of the camera but as an active collaborator in the construction of one of cinema’s most durable images. Associate curator Sophia Serrano told the Los Angeles Times that Monroe “understood the camera better than anyone” and was meticulous about how she appeared on screen – rejecting A-line silhouettes in CinemaScope because she found them unflattering, for instance, and insisting on approval of her photographs.
One room in the exhibition documents Monroe’s feud with 20th Century Fox through a series of telegrams between director Billy Wilder and Arthur Miller, in which Wilder complains about Monroe’s behaviour on set and Miller defends his wife. It is a small, revealing detail: even her professional conflicts were conducted through intermediaries, filtered through the patriarchal structure of the studio system she was trying to dismantle.
The exhibition also addresses the nude calendar photographs – the so-called “Golden Dream” series – that emerged in 1952 when Monroe was filming Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Studio head Darryl Zanuck pressured her to deny they were of her. She did the opposite. “I was broke and I needed the money,” she told reporters. “I’m not ashamed of it; I’ve done nothing wrong.” It was an act of defiance that anticipated the sex-positive politics of later decades by half a century.
The Fight That Changed the Industry
Monroe’s battle with the studios is the story the centennial exhibitions most urgently want to tell, because its consequences are still visible. In December 1953, she refused to appear in the musical There’s No Business Like Show Business, deeming the role empty. Fox responded by suspending her contract and orchestrating a press campaign to paint her as an ungrateful diva. Monroe’s countermove was characteristically bold: in January 1954, she married baseball hero Joe DiMaggio, redirecting the tabloid glare, then flew to Korea to perform for hundreds of thousands of American troops – an appearance that made her untouchable.
By late 1955, she had fled to New York, hired a formidable attorney, and announced the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions – the first production company established by an actress since Mary Pickford’s United Artists in the silent era. “I am tired of the same old sex roles,” she said at the press conference. “I want to do more interesting things. People have depths, you know.”
The studio capitulated. Fox signed a new contract that gave Monroe profit participation, veto power over projects, and the right to work with other companies. It was an unprecedented concession, and its ripple effects were felt across the industry. As the Los Angeles Times critic Mary McNamara noted, Monroe’s example accelerated a shift that would eventually produce the New Hollywood of the 1970s – a system built on independent production rather than studio servitude.
A Century of Being Seen
What is striking about the 2026 commemorations is their insistence on complexity. The Palm Springs centennial – which included a four-day film festival, choral performances, and a drag brunch – culminated on 30 May with an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Over a thousand participants assembled beneath the Seward Johnson statue Forever Marilyn in the city’s downtown, many in the iconic white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch. The previous record was shattered.
It is an image that could be read as pure kitsch, but the New York Times reporter who covered the event noted something more nuanced: each participant seemed to carry a personal version of Monroe, a private identification that resisted flattening into a single narrative. The same impulse drives the auction houses – Heritage Auctions is selling over 80 items on 1 June, including previously unseen love letters between Monroe and Arthur Miller, while Julien’s Auctions hosts 100 Years of Marilyn on 4 June in Los Angeles.
In Paris, the Cinémathèque Française has mounted a companion exhibition running through late July, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York staged a Monroe-centred screening series in April, focused on her films set in the city where she reinvented herself.
What Monroe Still Demands
The centennial’s most penetrating insight may be the simplest: that Monroe’s enduring power lies not in her beauty, which was real but fleeting, nor in her tragedy, which has been mythologised beyond recognition, but in the act of self-creation itself. She was Norma Jeane, a factory worker who became a pin-up, who became an actress, who became a producer, who became – against all probability – the most recognisable human face of the twentieth century.
That trajectory was not an accident. As the Academy Museum’s Sophia Serrano observed, Monroe’s persona “was carefully constructed. She knew how to give just enough, to create the illusion of something.” The illusion was the art, and the art was a form of agency exercised in an industry that granted women almost none.
One hundred years on, the question Monroe posed – whether a woman can be simultaneously desirable and autonomous, vulnerable and powerful, an object of desire and the subject of her own story – remains unanswered. The exhibitions, the auctions, the record-breaking gatherings of lookalikes in white dresses: they are not nostalgia. They are a society still grappling with the terms she set.
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