For the past 60 years, it's been impossible to separate Marilyn Monroe 's longevity as a superstar from her death. And yet it's the cultural punch she packed when she was alive—radiating beauty and charisma from the screen while her tumultuous personal life perpetually overshadowed her serious acting ability—that made people obsessed with her untimely demise. In turn, ever since a 36-year-old Monroe was found dead—or was she?—at her Brentwood home on Aug.
5, 1962, for many there's been a mystery to be solved along with a flesh-and-blood person to be mourned. There isn't much about the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, that hasn't been thoroughly parsed, from her childhood bouncing between foster homes and never knowing her father to her longing to have a child of her own to her rumored affairs with men in very high places and the subsequent conspiracy theories that her love life got her killed. The 2022 film Blonde , adapted from the meaty Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Ana de Armas and a devastating twist of the facts of Monroe's rise and fall , turning her life into a series of low points.
But as the icon herself is heard saying in the 2022 Netflix documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes , "How do you go about writing a life story? Because the true things rarely get into circulation. It's usually the false things. It's hard to know where to start if you don't start with the tr.
