Monroe At 80

Sheila O'Malley has a great piece on Marilyn Monroe, whose eightieth birthday it would have been today:

The photos below were from Bert Stern's famous last session with Marilyn - which involved her drinking champagne and rolling around naked in a big white bed. There are hundreds of photos from that shoot - all of them hypnotic. She is a chameleon. That's what's so amazing about her. So many beautiful women have only ONE LOOK. They need to arrange their faces into that ONE LOOK in order to continue to be beautiful. I mean, think about the practiced red carpet smiles of all the soulless little starlets parading about now. Monroe is, by any standards, gorgeous ... but it's amazing how alive she is, in print. Laughing, pensive, mischievous, serious, shy - all of it seems real, vital, in the moment, not rehearsed ... This is what it means to be a genius at being a model. And Marilyn was a genius - I'm not sure she was as an actress, but in terms of print work? Nobody even comes close to her abilities.

Read the whole thing (although if you're at work, be careful - there are some photos your boss might yip about)

Posted by Mitch at June 2, 2006 06:24 AM | TrackBack