Everyone recognizes her face, the blonde hair, the red lipstick, that white dress.
Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous women in history, but do you know her life outside of the movies?
Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
It is March, which is Women's History Month, and March 8th is International Women's Day.
In honor of this month, I wanted to talk about one of the most famous women from the past hundred years, and that is Marilyn Monroe.
But a lot of people don't know her story and really only know her from her famous roles.
So on today's episode, we are going to talk about her early life, the creation of Marilyn Monroe, the roles that made her famous and the parts of her life that many fans didn't know about.
As we do this, you're going to hear real, natural English vocabulary that we use to tell the story.
Words about identity, fame, and of course, Hollywood.
So are you ready to practice your listening comprehension and learn these vocabulary terms?
Then follow along, because we're about to begin.
Now let's talk about Marilyn Monroe.
Before she was known by that name, she was actually Norma Jean.
Norma Jean Mortensen was born in Los Angeles in 1926.
That's right, she was actually a California and LA native.
Sally though, her childhood was very unstable, meaning that she didn't have one consistent home.
Her mother struggled with mental health issues and spent a lot of time in hospitals.
Norma Jean therefore got sent to live in different locations, including even foster homes and orphanages.
Foster homes are homes where you are sent to live with someone who is not your biological family.
Sometimes it's a temporary situation or sometimes it lasts much longer.
This is usually because a child does not have a very stable parent to take care of them.
During this time, she did not feel very secure and she may have even been abused at one or more of these places.
As a result, she became withdrawn, which means that she was very quiet and she did not connect with other people easily.
She did not have a very friendly or outgoing personality.
Her childhood had a lasting effect on her.
She learned that things could change really quickly and that the people around her might just disappear at any time.
As a teenager.
She left high school, got married very young and then took a job in a factory to support herself during World War II.
While she was working in this factory, a photographer noticed her.
He took photos of her for a magazine, and those photos changed the course of her life.
She began to model and quickly found success.
It was during these modeling years that she straightened her natural dark curly hair and also started to lighten it.
This was the beginning of her physical transformation.
In 1946, she signed a contract with 20th Century Fox, a major Hollywood film studio.
A contract is a legal document and an agreement to work, and it was necessary in the studio system that existed in Hollywood at that time.
We will talk more about the studio system next week, but for the moment, it's just important to know that when you signed a contract with a Hollywood film studio, they took control of your life.
The studio gave her a new name, Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn was inspired by a Broadway actress and Monroe was her mother's maiden name.
A maiden name is a woman's last name before she gets married.
At the same time, her appearance was strictly controlled.
The studio had her dye her hair blonde and maintained as part of her public image.
From that point on, Marilyn Monroe was no longer a private citizen.
She was a professional creation created for studio audiences.
In Hollywood, Marilyn was given a very specific role.
She was typecast.
Typecast means to be given one type of role in multiple different movies or TV shows.
In Marilyn's case, she was typecast as the dumb blonde.
Blonde because that was the color of her hair, and dumb because the roles were always women, who did not seem very intelligent.
Even though she herself was very intelligent and worked very hard, the studios continued to put her in these roles that focused more on her appearance than her acting abilities.
Some of her most famous roles are 1953's Gentleman Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire.
But the most famous image of her in that white dress comes from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch.
That image became iconic and entered into pop culture, which means that it became widely known.
Of course her beauty helped her, but it was her comedic timing that really made these movies popular and made her famous.
Comedic timing means knowing when to speak or react in order to be funny.
As she became more famous, her private life, the life that she lived away from the camera, became harder to protect.
Many people expected her to act like the characters that she played on screen.
This caused her a lot of stress and her private life began to suffer.
In 1954, she married the famous baseball star Joe DiMaggio after meeting him on a blind date.
If you listened to our Valentine's Day episode on dating vocabulary, you will know what that term means.
Their relationship was not good mainly because he was so jealous and because she was so famous and got so much public attention.
There are even reports that suggest that the relationship turned violent after he saw the white dress scene in The Seven Year Itch.
Later she had a relationship with the writer Arthur Miller and married him in 1956, after he divorced his wife.
I mentioned Arthur Miller in the episode I did on the Salem Witch Trials because he was a famous playwright and he wrote a play about those trials.
With him, she was hoping to find stability and to be taken more seriously for her intelligence.
She even told him that she was willing to leave Hollywood and just go live a quiet life with him.
But that didn't happen.
She continued acting and she continued to struggle more.
Monroe was an avid reader, which meant that she read all the time in dressing rooms, on film sets, on planes.
Reading for her was not just a hobby.
It was a form of self-development and a way to obtain knowledge.
She was influenced by writers and thinkers who were critical of racism, censorship and authoritarian power.
These were writers like James Baldwin, John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, and her husband Arthur Miller.
Monroe was also rather politically liberal for her time.
She supported civil rights, workers' rights, and peace movements.
This was not always safe to do in Hollywood at that time.
There was something called the McCarthy era that was occurring.
What it meant was that if you were seen as being too liberal, you could actually destroy your career.
But Monroe knew that she could use her fame to help change things.
She publicly praised African-American artists when that was not socially safe to do, and she maintained close friendships with Black musicians and actors.
One of the most documented and important actions she took was her support of Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella Fitzgerald was an African American jazz singer and is considered to be one of the best and most important jazz singers in American history.
But at the time, many of the top clubs in Los Angeles and Las Vegas were segregated.
I've mentioned segregation in previous episodes, but it was a practice where the American citizens were separated based on race.
Because the clubs were segregated.
That meant that Black performers were often not allowed to perform for white audiences.
Monroe used her fame because she personally called the manager of the Macabo Club in Los Angeles and said if you hire ella fitzgerald, i will sit in the front row every night.
Of course the club agreed because she was marilyn monroe and her presence made press come to the club as well as members of the public.
Because of that, ella fitzgerald's career exploded.
As her career continued, Marilyn Monroe tried to change the way she was seen.
She started studying acting seriously and tried to take more challenging roles.
She really wanted to be respected for her abilities as an actress.
However, this pressure that she put on herself affected her confidence.
She started getting very anxious, worrying that she was making mistakes, and started to doubt herself.
She often needed reassurance from those around her.
Reassurance means that you get emotional support or encouragement from someone.
She also started spending a lot of time with her acting coach.
These struggles started to affect her professionalism, which means how reliable she was on the film set.
She could arrive late, not remember her lines, and not be able to film a scene.
Of course, this started frustrating people around her.
This tension is shown in the film My Week with Marilyn, which depicts a week of 1956 when she was filming The Princess and the Showgirl.
This movie depicts her as vulnerable, struggling with her acting, her fame, and her marriage.
But the movie also showed that she was really difficult to work with and how she was maybe taking advantage of how people, especially men, treated her.
As the pressure increased, her health declined.
She started relying more on prescription medication to help with her anxiety and exhaustion.
Over time, the situation worsened.
She suffered multiple miscarriages and was hospitalized after a severe drug overdose.
However, she continued acting and made one of her most successful films, Some Like It Hot.
She struggled while filming this because she did not know her lines and constantly fought with the director.
However, the film was a massive success and it is considered one of her best performances.
But after that movie her reputation for being difficult and her increasing drug use really started to affect her career.
She tried to change her image, but she was still struggling with addiction and her mental health.
And sadly, in August of 1962, she was found dead in her house after an apparent overdose.
Of course you can watch any of Marilyn Monroe's famous films if you want to see how she was as an actress.
And you can also see some fictional depictions.
Like I said, there is the film My Week with Marilyn, which shows how she was struggling later in her career.
Also shows how she could be very charming and very charismatic.
There's also the 1996 HBO television film called Norma Jean and Marilyn.
This separates Norma Jean and Marilyn as two different identities and shows the conflict she had with her identity and with her mental health.
You will notice that a lot of depictions of her try to show the struggle that she had, especially later in her career.
I know she's known for being very beautiful, but to me she always seemed like such a sad and tragic figure.
She had a difficult life.
She struggled with her mental health and addiction, and she died very young.
And also Sally, that's a story that we see with a lot of different celebrities.
However, even after death, she still remained famous.
Her image is still referenced today, all of these decades later.
However, a lot of people might just remember her for being a symbol and not as the full person that she was.
When people get known for one image, a lot of the time the rest of their life is ignored.
And remembering that can help us understand her life more clearly and more honestly.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you learned a little bit about Marilyn Monroe.
And, more importantly, I hope you learned some natural English terms that you can use in everyday conversations.
A reminder to look at the description of this podcast episode for helpful links and for the vocabulary list.
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