8 performances that will change the way you think about Marilyn Monroe

John Huston’s western is a real heartbreaker, both on and off screen. It represents her final on-screen role, as well as that of co-star Clark Gable – it was one of Montgomery Clift’s last, too – and the set was a troubled, hard-boozing place from which Monroe would absent herself for two weeks in rehab. It’s a film full of wounded, lonely souls, too, who find communion breaking horses on the salt flats of Nevada. Monroe’s then-husband, Arthur Miller, penned a screenplay that gifted her the role of jaded divorcée Roslyn Tabor, a beautiful, complex woman who becomes a blank canvas for troubled men to project their hopes onto. Maybe it’s self-knowledge you can see in a character whose emotional wounds are almost visible. It’s the deepest, strongest turn of her career. It also leaves you reflecting on what she might have gone on to achieve.

For all the efforts to retroactively paint Marilyn Monroe as a purely tragic figure, her signature film role is also her silliest. In Billy Wilder’s Hays Code-skirting (ahem) cross-dressing comedy, Monroe plays Sugar ‘Kane’ Kowalczy, a ukulele-strumming frontwoman of the all-female orchestra providing cover for Jack Lemmon and Jack Curtis, donning full drag in order to hide out from the mob after witnessing the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. Even in today’s more gender-sensitive times, the movie remains undeniably charming, owing much to the juxtaposition of Monroe’s ne plus ultra sultriness with her co-stars’ flailing imitation of femininity. Monroe reportedly struggled mightily with her lines, but it hardly comes across on screen – she won a Golden Globe for her performance, the highest acting honour of her career.

As flirty and fun as any musical committed to the screen, Howard Hawks’ comedy of excess has Monroe knocking it out of the park as material girl Lorelei Lee, who travels to France with her less money-centric pal Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) to marry wealthy fiancé Gus. When she delivers a jazzy ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in an electric pink ball gown, it could just be the perfect four minutes of cinema. If there was a downside to this cinematic joyride, it’s that it reinforced lazy perceptions of her as a ‘dumb blonde’ on-screen. 

Monroe broke through in the later heyday of Hollywood noirs, and while she never got the kind of plum roles Gloria Graham, Gene Tierney and Barbara Stanwyck were blessed with, she did give pretty good femme fatale in Henry Hathaway’s overheated thriller. She plays Rose Loomis, unhappy wife to a traumatised Korean war veteran (Joseph Cotten), whose idea of a romantic getaway to Niagara Falls involves bloody murder. The film – and its costume department – leans in hard on Monroe’s sex appeal, but she brings satisfying grit to the role of scheming wife. Niagara lives on most vividly via Andy Warhol’s famous ​​’Marilyn Diptych’, which uses a single publicity shot of Monroe promoting the film.

‘She had the greatest sensitivity of any actor that I’d seen’, said Monroe’s acting mentor, Lee Stasberg, who’d often compare her with Brando. Not a lot of that sensitivity is called on in this fluffy romcom which has her showing off her comedy chops in a role so archetypal, the character is literally called ‘The Girl’. Made under the constraints of the Hays Code, the romance itself is about as sexy as a cold kipper, but the coquettish Monroe is a lightning bolt of radiance – as captured in that famous blowy-dress shot above a subway vent. Ultimately, though, the vent was the only thing airer than the movie that even its director, Billy Wilder, dismissed as ‘a nothing picture’

A hotel-set psychodrama that has Marilyn Monroe in the ‘psycho’ role as a troubled babysitter who lures Richard Widmark’s airline pilot on the rocks with her feminine wiles. Yep, it’s that movie – although the actress fleshes out this portrayal of mental illness effectively to bring extra shades to the role, drawing on her experiences with her own schizophrenic mother.

One of two memorable collaborations with John Huston, Monroe appears in this moody noir in a small but distinctive role as the luminous young moll to Louis Calhern’s clammy lawyer-turned-robber. It’s an early showcase of her ability to embody a rare kind of freighted innocence (she’s sweet, but she’s trouble), and it manifests here as a necessary shard of light to briefly pierce the enveloping gloom of Huston’s fast-souring heist flick. 

Another breakout supporting role in a film that turned out to be an all-time great, Monroe (and her agent) hit her stride early as Broadway ingénue Claudia Casswell, who finds herself caught in a crossfire of catty put downs at a party put on by Bette Davis’s Margo Channing. It’s tempting to think that the young Monroe must have felt a lot like her character, suffering imposter syndrome among the cast of established greats, but she brings poise and balance to this classic scene. Wearing all white among the black ties and dresses, she’s an obvious outsider who has zero chance of breaking into this jaded, jealous clique.