Marilyn Monroe was the first to play Marilyn Monroe.
“Do you want to see me become her?” the actress, born Norma Jean Mortensen, asked one day while walking down Broadway in New York, according to Amy Greene, wife of Monroe’s photographer Milton Greene.
“I don’t know how to explain what she did because it was so subtle,” Green recalled in 2020. “But she turned on something magical inside her, and all of a sudden the car slowed down and people started turning around and stopping and staring.”
It wasn’t just her platinum blonde hair and glowing smile that turned the “Some Like It Hot” star into a legend. But recreating her iconic physical features has certainly been a good starting point for the many actresses who have played Monroe on screen over the past four decades, as well as for all the celebrities who have tried on her style for size.
A Week With Marilyn’s Michelle Williams and Ana de Armas give their own surprising interpretations of the moment when Marilyn becomes Marilyn in the 2022 film Blonde, and both received Oscar nominations for their portrayals of the underrated actresses.
“People wanted Marilyn and they wanted the product,” de Armas told Today at the time. “She had to keep communicating that, because the opposite is nothing. She was nothing else. She wasn’t seen as anything else.”
