But as good as Williams is — as good as she always is — and as devoted as she clearly was to embodying this woman fully, you never truly forget that you're watching an extended impression of the pop culture icon. A lot of that has to do with the fact that this is indeed a legend she's playing, and it's difficult to take mythology and turn it into something tangible and true. But the script from Adrian Hodges, based on memoirs by Colin Clark, doesn't offer Williams much substance or subtlety with which to work.
The Monroe she's given functions in only two gears: Either she's the dazzling, charismatic sex symbol of lore, or she's stoned, insecure and in constant need of coddling. Surely there was more complexity to this woman who continues to fascinate us nearly four decades after her untimely death, but you won't find it here.
That kind of reductive approach unfortunately prevails throughout from director Simon Curtis, a British television veteran making his feature filmmaking debut. Laurence Olivier comes off as cartoonishly arrogant and vain, despite being played by Kenneth Branagh, an actor of great depth (who happens to share Olivier's affinity for Shakespeare). The Method acting technique that Monroe applied is a repeated target of jokes, as if it were some sort of flimsy, fringy philosophy (and Zoe Wanamaker, as acting coach Paula Strasberg, comes off as a caricature of a yenta).
One of the least developed characters of all is the one who is central to this story and serves as our conduit. He's Colin Clark himself (Eddie Redmayne), a young, star-struck and personality-free assistant on "The Prince and the Showgirl," which Monroe was shooting in England in 1956. Colin comes from money but wants to prove himself by working his way up from the bottom in the film world.
Monroe, by contrast, is the most famous person on the planet at this point. But despite her celebrity and new marriage to Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), she desperately wants to be taken seriously. Even though this picture is a light romantic comedy, it gives her a chance to work with Olivier as both her director and co-star. She is, of course, paralyzed with fear. Olivier's wife, Vivien Leigh (played with grace and candor by Julia Ormond) tries to encourage her. Another of Monroe's co-stars, the far more seasoned and distinguished Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench), reaches out to her with patience and kindness.
But for some reason, Monroe also seeks comfort in Colin, of all people — according to him, at least. This is, after all, his story. She keeps drawing him closer, which becomes easier when Miller returns to the United States, even as all her various hangers-on view him as a threat and try to push him away.
Prior to the development of this relationship, though, "My Week With Marilyn" offers an amusing (though not exactly novel) peek at the stir Monroe's presence caused in the rural area surrounding Pinewood Studios west of London. The actual filmmaking process, especially with the involvement of such esteemed figures, is always fascinating to watch. Or at least it should be. Like the depiction of Monroe herself, the film as a whole rings hollow with a kind of airy, unsatisfying emptiness.
"My Week With Marilyn," a Weinstein Co. release, is rated R for language. Running time: 101 minutes. Two stars out of four.
"Much more comfortable," she said, crossing her legs and unwrapping a granola bar.
The night before, Williams, 31, had flown into Los Angeles for 48 hours from shooting "Oz: The Great and Powerful" playing Glinda the good witch.
At that moment, however, Williams was out of that head space and focusing on another enchanting woman who weaved her magic on American cinema: Marilyn Monroe.
Williams stars as the iconic starlet in the indie film "My Week with Marilyn," based on Colin Clark's book of the same name and opening in U.S. theaters on November 23.
It chronicles the author's experience of spending a week with Monroe in 1956 while she was in England shooting the romantic comedy "The Prince and the Showgirl" opposite Sir Laurence Olivier.
"This isn't the Marilyn Monroe story, so the movie is not a tragedy," Williams said. "It's a movie that Marilyn Monroe happens to be a character in."
It's also the type of movie that may resonate with Oscar voters. Williams has been Oscar-nominated twice, as best supporting actress for "Brokeback Mountain" and best actress for 2010 drama "Blue Valentine."
Now, as she embodies one of Hollywood's own, Williams may find herself on a winning streak. Between 2000 and 2010, seven of the best actress Oscar wins were for roles depicting real people including Sandra Bullock ("The Blind Side"), Marion Cotillard ("La Vie en Rose") and Helen Mirren ("The Queen").
Williams laughed off the thought.
"I try not to live in the future because it's crazy!" she said with a blush. "I'm just relieved that I paid a proper homage, because I didn't want to let her down."
She was referring to Monroe and the research and physical transformation it took to embody the legendary actress.
"I watched every movie countless times," Williams explained. "The Internet became a great research tool. There were a few fronts that were up and running simultaneously -- the physical, the facade, and her essence."
MOVING LIKE MONROE
One of those was the way Monroe moved. Williams described it as "a series of continuous poses, completely fluid, but at any point if you stopped, you could take a picture and it would be a perfectly set up pose."
Gesturing with her hands, she continued: "It looked like she loved her body, loved touching her body, loved referencing it, loved being able to guide people's attention to where she wanted them to look."
Though in person the waif-like Williams bears little physical resemblance to Monroe, in the film, she is as voluptuous as Monroe.
Were those her real hips? Or padding? Can she talk about which body parts were hers and which weren't?
"Apparently not," she demurred. "Apparently my director had some other ideas about it."
"I was definitely heavier than I am now, but I really don't know how much," she added. "But there are ways that she and I will never meet physically. For certain things, no matter what I do, I won't be able to achieve that sameness...I was never going to get a body like hers!"
What Williams does have is a singing voice and coordinated feet. The actress does all the singing and dancing in the film, despite her only previous such experience being as a child doing children's theater.
"Who knew I would actually sing and dance in the movie? I had a blast!" said Williams.
Despite the fun, Williams was keenly aware of Monroe's tragic side -- the pills, the alcohol, the marriages and her co-dependency on other people.
"Something about her said, 'Love me, protect me,' and a lot of people took that on and felt a kind of devotion to her," mused Williams.
Many people felt a similar protectiveness toward Williams when in 2008, her former boyfriend and "Brokeback Mountain" co-star Heath Ledger died of an accidental drug overdose, making the actress a single mother to their child, Matilda, who is now 6 years-old.
Though Williams declined to drudge up that past, she did say that unlike Marilyn, "I'm not in as needy of a place, although I think I was when I played the (Marilyn) role. I found myself becoming far more dependent and clingy in a way that I had never done before.
"Luckily, I have a stabilizing force, which is my daughter," she continued. "I often think, if Marilyn had a kid, she would have pulled through, I really do."
Making last year's "Blue Valentine," which painfully and intimately depicted the collapse of a young marriage, occasionally seems so intense of a memory to Williams as to be a true one.
"When I look back on my life and I sort of reflect on relationships or anything, my mind folds that one into the mix of the real relationships that I've had in my life," says the actress. "And I have to stop myself and say, 'Oh, no, you did not marry and divorce Ryan Gosling.'"
While delusions of wedding Ryan Gosling aren't necessarily uncommon to moviegoers, for Williams they exemplify the intensely introspective approach she takes to her work.
Going by her latest film, "My Week With Marilyn," it's clear Williams has undergone a shift. After years of predominantly raw, naturalistic films like "Wendy and Lucy" and "Blue Valentine," in "My Week With Marilyn," she's glamorous and radiant. That, too, is telling of an interior change in Williams.
"One thing that I've struggled with, been interested in just as a person, a girl-slash-woman, whatever I am at 31 in this world, is being comfortable with myself," Williams says. "I've just spent a lot of time getting to know that person and getting to like that person, so I haven't wanted to lose touch with that person through lenses like hair and make-up and clothes."
Yet "Marilyn," which opens Nov. 23, is drawing Williams some of the best reviews of her career, and has put her squarely in the running for a best actress Academy Award. Williams' performance somehow manages to evoke a fully-fleshed person, well beyond mere caricature. It's a layered rendering of Monroe: a public, glorious Marilyn; a private and vulnerable actress; and the song-and-dance showgirl of "The Prince and the Showgirl."
The film chronicles the production of that 1957 film, which Laurence Olivier directed and co-starred in with Monroe. The two clashed: an oil and water mix of classical British theater and American movie stardom.
"There's technically an enormous challenge, which (Williams) meets lightly, effortlessly," says Kenneth Branagh, who plays Olivier. "Then she puts that all away to one side, doesn't show off to the audience about it. ... She doesn't indulge in playing Marilyn, she just is. It required her to work enormously hard and then hide all the work."
In a recent interview over afternoon tea at a Manhattan hotel, Williams is refreshingly candid. She's dressed elegantly but simply in a black and white dress and wearing a short, blonde pixie haircut that she has said is a tribute to Heath Ledger — her former partner and father to her 6-year-old daughter, Matilda — who liked cropped hair.
Williams would have more reason than most to be guarded, but she answers questions warmly and pensively. When Ledger died in 2008 (a few months after he and Williams separated), an onslaught of media attention landed on Williams, who has since often been hounded by paparazzi. It's an experience that frequently hovers just outside Williams' words, an unspoken tumult.
Williams was born in a small town in northwest Montana. Though her family moved to San Diego when she was 9, Williams believes Montana "formed me in some fundamental way" and that, although she lives in a townhouse in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, she "will always feel most at home in nature."
In California, Williams became interested in acting after she and her sister performed in community plays. In a nice touch of foreshadowing, she kept a poster of Monroe on her bedroom wall. As Williams' young acting career grew in TV and movies, she emancipated from her parents at age 15. Two years later, she was cast in "Dawson's Creek," the WB teen drama that ran for six seasons and catapulted Williams' fame.
Williams' film career took off with 2005's "Brokeback Mountain." She received her first Oscar nomination (a second would come for "Blue Valentine") for her performance as the rejected wife of Ledger's cowboy.
She's since drawn the interest of directors like Martin Scorsese ("Shutter Island") and Wim Wenders ("Land of Plenty"), but perhaps been most comfortable in independent films ("Synecdoche, New York," ''I'm Not There").
She's twice worked with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt in low-budget films notable for their realism: 2008's "Wendy and Lucy," a film about a woman living in poverty with just her dog and a beat-up car, and this year's "Meek's Cutoff," a gritty depiction of life on the Oregon Trail in 1845. Williams slept in her character's car for "Wendy and Lucy," and learned how to drive oxen for "Meek's Cutoff."
"She really likes the chance to hide and just be able to be a person," says Reichardt. "These films have sort of offered her a chance to work while just being able to blend into the world in a way that becomes probably more difficult."
Reichardt said Williams has been sending her iPhone photos of the craft service table from her current film — Sam Raimi's "Wizard of Oz" prequel, "Oz: The Great and Powerful," in which Williams plays Glinda the Good Witch — exclaiming, "We could make a whole movie with this!"
Williams says she's long had an interest "in naturalism, in no shine on anything, no polish, no veneer.."
"What I've hoped for is to have as little separation between the character that I'm playing and the people in the audience — nothing that made the character feel out of reach," the actress says. "'Wendy and Lucy' was, I don't know if it was the culmination, but definitely that was what I was ultimately aiming for."
Whereas she rolled out of bed for "Wendy and Lucy," ''My Week With Marilyn" required three hours of hair and makeup every morning.
"In the film, there's a sort of contrast between the American interior, psychological way of working, and the English external, theatrical way of working," says director Simon Curtis. "But in fact, Michelle came at the character of Marilyn in both directions."
Asked when it was that she realized she wanted to act, Williams says, "That's a decision that I make again and again and again." She lists a series of "mile-marker moments": doing her first English accent, finding camaraderie on the set of "Station Agent," making "Wendy and Lucy," working with Gosling.
Of the less certain times, she says, biting her lip, "Some of them I would hate to bring up." The first Oscar nomination, she acknowledges, "stymied me somehow ... I felt like people were watching. I felt like there was pressure where there used to be none."
People are still watching Williams, but it doesn't seem to bother her much anymore.
"I've noticed that now, at 31, my ideas about scenes or dialogue or moments, they come faster," she says. "And I find that I'm enjoying it and that that's not hampering my work, so maybe it doesn't have to be as hard as I was making it out to be for so many years."
"Want to get under the covers with me?" she purrs, raising her eyebrows and wrapping a fuzzy blanket around her bare legs as she snuggles on a couch.
How very Marilyn Monroe of her. And Williams, with a wink and a grin, knows it. If early word of mouth is any indication, the actress will be sashaying her way to an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Hollywood's platinum-haired stunner in My Week with Marilyn, opening Nov. 23. In the film, about the making of Monroe's 1957 romp The Prince and the Showgirl, Williams plays three characters: the privately neurotic, strung-out Monroe; the delightful, lighthearted, sexpot persona the actress adopted in public; and the adorkable character Monroe plays in the movie.
Embodying three versions of one indelibly iconic woman was, says Williams, "the hardest thing I've ever done. Most days it was an act of courage to stay on set, stay in the chair, and not flee."
Unlike Monroe, Williams, 31, isn't anxious or insecure about her work. Nor is she a tortured artiste who agonizes over every nuance. Yet she doesn't go easy on herself either. When told of the early accolades her performance is getting, Williams scrunches up her face. "So, what do you think?" she asks. "What doesn't work? I keep thinking about the bad things."
Williams left little to chance when prepping to play Monroe, a woman who appeared in some 30 films yet whose allure far outlasted her short career and lived on after her mysterious 1962 death. Williams watched Monroe's films. She listened to her sing. She began quietly, tentatively adopting the breathy voice, the specific hand movements, the come-hither walk.
"I just tried to make her presence gradually and unobtrusively fill my life and my house. I tried to build it, so it didn't feel like work or study that I had to do, just a slow seeping in. I started to try and mimic what I saw and what I heard privately in my house, and I started to take that a little bit out in the world, try something in the post office or the grocery store," she says.
Her methods worked, reports Kenneth Branagh. He plays Laurence Olivier, the prince to Monroe's showgirl. "The one way Michelle Williams did not embody Marilyn Monroe was that she showed up on time. Everything else, she seemed to get Marilyn," he says.
Indeed, early on, Williams shot the scene in which Monroe arrives at Pinewood Studios in London and meets her somewhat aloof British co-stars. As Williams plays her, the real Monroe was terrified and overcome with insecurity and fear of imminent failure, and raced out of the room. Williams, on the other hand, "was poised," says Branagh. " Michelle came up and said hello to everybody. She was neither overconfident nor overawed. She was somehow real. You were immediately aware that there was a genuine and true quality to her. Simplicity is a very hard thing to achieve in life or in art, and she has it."
Why Monroe?
Williams still isn't sure, despite her research, what exactly made Monroe such a monumental, mythical, eternally glamorous presence. Today, thanks to the advent of camera phones and the Internet, you'd likely have photos of Monroe drunkenly exiting a bar. Instead, she lives on as an embodiment of timeless, bleached, curvy perfection.
"When I first started researching it, I kind of naively assumed that that was Marilyn Monroe. It was a very carefully constructed persona that she put on. It was an absolute fabrication. Everyone said she had quite an average walk and quite an average voice. It was something she turned on at will. I still wonder about it. What captures people's interest about her?"
As for the fawning, unhinged hysteria that accompanied Monroe when she was out in public? Williams, who lives in Brooklyn with daughter Matilda, 6, can't even begin to relate, or understand, what Monroe's life must have been like.
"I don't think I have that problem. I don't know what you'd call it. She was beloved. That's unlike anything I'll ever know," says Williams with a laugh.
She got an unwelcome taste of it three years ago following the January 2008 overdose death of her former boyfriend, and Matilda's father, Heath Ledger. Before, during, and after, Williams mostly kept her head down, making small films and raising her child. Things have settled down, but sometimes, Williams wonders what her life would be had she not become a nomadic actress.
"Do you ever play that game with yourself, 'What if?' What's your parallel life like? I don't really do a lot in my parallel life. I'm not very productive. I mostly just have kids and sew and read books," she says.
There's something charmingly contemplative and honest about Williams. And despite her proclivity for heavy roles in dramas such as Blue Valentine and Wendy and Lucy, there's an ease and lightness to her.
"She's a proper serious artist, but she's naughty and twinkly and giggly. She likes a bit of a laugh," says Branagh. "She is interested in other people. She doesn't make it all about her. She has vitality. She's jolly good company, upbeat and fun. I felt that she put me at my ease."
She likes a low-key life
Williams isn't a workaholic. Nor is she particularly driven. In a perfect world, Williams would shoot one or two films a year, ideally during her daughter's summer vacation, and spend the remainder of the year at home with Matilda
"I'm not an ambitious person, but I do like a challenge. I go back and forth on it a lot, a lot. I think — I could be wrong — that I'd be just as happy being married and having a bunch of kids. I'd love more kids. But that's not what my life is right now," she says with a shrug.
Instead, Williams has found herself ensconced in Detroit for the rest of the year, shooting Sam Raimi's fable Oz: The Great and Powerful. She's Glinda, the good witch, a fact that has impressed her daughter.
"It's a dream come true for both of us. It's a magical world. She comes every day after school. Big beautiful sets. Amazing costumes. Magical apparatus. Apparati? Wands and flying," says Williams.
Raimi says there's a reason why Williams is so bewitching: "I needed a combination of a good soul and a great actress. She's very quick with a smile. It makes you feel special to be with her. She's very warm."
Williams is gamine and slightly ethereal, all wide eyes and blond pixie locks, but there's also a resolve to her. Given that most former Dawson's Creek upstarts don't end up on Oscar shortlists, her success is no accident. And while she's collaborative, she won't let you push her around.
"She is a very wonderful hybrid of a strong human being while also having a fragility that gives her an almost skinless quality and lets audiences see into her thoughts. In life she has that same strength and absolute knowledge of what she wants," says Eddie Redmayne, who plays her young paramour in Marilyn.
And what she doesn't. Her greatest achievement has been giving Matilda a relatively normal childhood. Williams will tell you ample stories, off the record, about Matilda's achievements in school and her little quirks. As long as you promise to keep them private.
"That's where my biggest effort goes — raising her to be a happy kid who's a face among many, who's allowed a right to her face, her individuality, her anonymity," says Williams.
Monroe floundered when it came to negotiating her public and private lives. Williams, too, grapples with fame, though in a far less destructive way.
"I think I'm a pretty transparent person. I don't feel particularly guarded. I want people to have an accurate, honest perception of who I am. I don't know why that matters to me, but it does. But that runs contrary to the fact that people enjoy your work more when they know less. I'm always struggling between those two polarities," she says.
"I wasn't watching what I ate, let's put it that way," Williams, 31, told PEOPLE Sunday, at the film's New York premiere, about her physical transformation, which also included some helpful wardrobe tricks that helped her jiggle a bit more.
"The costume designer and Michelle came up with some great stuff," said director Simon Curtis. "But an awful lot is Williams's understanding of the way Marilyn walked, and the way Williams herself took on the wiggle."
"She did all the hard work, knew how to dance, shimmy," added Kenneth Branagh, who plays Sir Laurence Olivier in the film.
Don Murray, who played opposite Monroe in Bus Stop in 1956, said Williams completely captures her likeness. "It's very, very accurate," he told PEOPLE. "Having spent 14 weeks with Marilyn, I know what she was really like. And Michelle really catches it."
What did Williams appreciate about the 1950s Monroe fashion? "I liked her kind of simplicity," she said. "She was so extraordinarily beautiful, but really quite unadorned."
Starring opposite Williams is Eddie Redmayne, 29, who plays Colin Clark, the director of The Prince and the Showgirl, the 1957 film featuring Monroe and Olivier. "I had seen him in Red, the play on Broadway. He won the Tony," Williams said of Redmayne. "And I immediately thought ... 'That's the boy, that's the one.' "
Williams herself has transformed fully back to herself since taking on the Monroe role. On Sunday, her famed pixie haircut appeared even shorter than usual. "I got a little trim about a week ago," she confided.
Memorabilia collectors and fans of the two stars will soon find out in a four-day, December auction of Hollywood memorabilia, called Icons and Idols, from Julien's Auctions.
The images of Bieber behind the scenes of his music video for "One Less Lonely Girl" and Monroe, which vary from items when she was an unknown to those when she was star, are just a few of the 1600 items from film, music and sports figures expected to go under the hammer in a sale that could fetch $2 million to $4 million, auctioneer Darren Julien estimated.
The 14 Polaroid photographs of Bieber, 17, were taken by a crew member on the video set, and are estimated to sell for $1,200. But when his legion of young "Beliebers" catch wind of the sale, that price could skyrocket to somewhere up around $6,000, Julien believes.
"He is highly collectible, and these kind of photographs rarely go on sale. I don't think Justin ever intended them to go on sale," said Julien.
Yet, unlike a known commodity such as Monroe, star of films including "Some Like It Hot" and "The Seven Year Itch," Bieber still might flame out as a pop idol.
"He's young and in some ways he still has to prove himself, but he's got the talent to be like John Lennon or Paul McCartney. He's got that potential, and he can be at that level of collectibility," said Julien.
The Monroe items range from early pictures of her as a 19-year-old and a never before sold letter, expected to fetch $30,000 to $50,000, she sent to her mother while still known as Norma Jeane and married to Jimmie Dougherty in which she talks of her future hopes.
Also up for sale is an image taken by Cecil Beaton after Monroe became a movie star in which the actress is reclining with a rose. The pictures were put in a Cartier triptych frame and said to be her favorite images of herself. It's estimated sale price is $80,000-$100,000.
With prices like that, it's very likely the Bieber photos will fall far short of Monroe's, but his fans can take heart in the title of his own song, "Never Say Never."
Personal items of late singer Michael Jackson also will be up for sale, including rare candid photographs of the King of Pop with actress Elizabeth Taylor and an oil painting of Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Pluto, painted by the singer.
Other items on sale include garments from Lady Gaga, Cher and the Beatles, as well as a signed guitar from U2's Bono.
Sports fans also have their share of historic memorabilia to bid on, including basketball player Michael Jordan's 1984 John Wooden Award and an original stadium locker attributed to famed Yankees baseball player Lou Gehrig.
More information can be found at www.juliensauctions.com
The Oscar-nominated actress is showing off her singing chops in just-released footage from the upcoming My Week With Marilyn, and if we didn't know better, we'd say it was the original blond bombshell herself!
Here's why...
Williams looks stunning while performing "Heat Wave," a song from Monroe's 1954 flick There's No Business Like Show Business.
The 33-year-old is a dead ringer for the late Hollywood icon in a sparkling nude dress with a thigh-high slit and Monroe's signature blond bob and red lips. Williams slinks around stage singing alongside several male dancers before blowing a flirty kiss to the camera.
"It's quite a dress to try to fill out," the pixie-cut beauty recently told us of channeling Monroe's sexy style.
We think you fill it out quite nicely, Ms. Williams: Video.
Um, how would she know that?
Monroe has apparently given her stamp of approval from beyond the grave...
"While we were filming, something came out in the National Enquirer that a psychic had spoken to her and that she approved of what we were doing and she thought I was doing a really good job," Williams told us at the Hollywood Film Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. "So maybe she likes it!" (Guess this is one of the rare cases when a celeb actually likes getting some ink in the supermarket tabloid!)
Perhaps Monroe allowed the 31-year-old Oscar nominee to channel her offscreen speaking voice.
"I studied tapes," Williams said. "There's really nothing that exists of her, that I could find anyway, that exists of her having a conversation with a friend...So there wasn't a template that existed for her everyday vocal pattern, so at a certain point you have to make it imaginatively."
Whether it was through research or imagination, Williams obviously nailed the late Hollywood legend's signature style.
"I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practicing my wiggle," Williams recently told Vogue. "There were three or four men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing that they were watching me come and feeling that they were watching me go...I thought, ‘Oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach.'"
"Thriller" singer Jackson, who died aged 50 of a drug overdose, is estimated to have earned $170 million in the past year, which also places him as the second highest-earning pop music act this year, dead or alive, Forbes.com said.
Jackson's physician at the time of his death, Dr. Conrad Murray, is currently on trial in Los Angeles, charged with involuntary manslaughter for administering the powerful anesthetic propofol as a sleep aid for the singer in Jackson's home. Murray has pleaded not guilty.
Jackson, whose name has rarely been out of the media headlines due to his sudden death and its cause, has seen sales of albums and memorabilia increase in the past year.
The theater group Cirque Du Soleil has mounted an extravagant show called "Immortal" that is based on the singer's life and music. Earlier this month, a tribute concert in Cardiff, Wales, lured tens of thousands of fans.
The King of Pop is followed closely by the King of Rock 'n' Roll Elvis Presley placed second on the list with earnings of $55 million. Like Jackson, Presley's estate has also benefited from Cirque du Soleil, who produced "Viva Elvis" in tribute to the late singer.
Hollywood's golden age pin-up girl, Marilyn Monroe, who died at age 36 in 1962, earned near $27 million, placing her third on the list.
Sultry screen icon Elizabeth Taylor, who passed away in March 2011 aged 79, was placed fifth after reportedly earning $12 million, with a large portion coming from the sales of her popular fragrance, "White Diamonds."
The Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list by Forbes takes into account any deceased famous figure who has earned at least $6 million between October 2010 and October 2011.
The full list can be viewed on Forbes.com at www.forbes.com/deadcelebs.
The Debbie Reynolds Collection auction in June far exceeded its initial estimates, and earned a place in the Guinness World Records after selling Monroe's iconic white "Subway Dress" for $5.52 million, making it the world's most expensive dress.
Fans and collectors of Monroe will have another chance of owning costumes worn by the late actress, priced between $150,000 and $300,000 at the Debbie Reynolds Collection Part II auction.
Monroe's provocatively sexy costumes were known for pushing the barrier set by strict film censorship codes. The December auction will feature Monroe's saucy showgirl leotard from the Oscar-nominated 1956 film "Bus Stop," designed by William Travilla, auctioneers Profile in History said on Tuesday.
The screen legend's gowns from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," the 1953 thriller "Niagara," and the 1960 Oscar-nominated comedy "Let's Make Love," will also be up for auction.
Reynolds, 79, began amassing the impressive collection when she was a young actress under contract at MGM. When the studio auctioned off everything except its real estate in 1970, she turned a pastime into what she called an "obsession."
But her dream of displaying her beloved costumes in a museum was dashed several times and she was forced to sell them to pay back creditors.
Monroe's four costumes will be auctioned in Beverly Hills as part of the Debbie Reynolds Collection Part II on December 3.
A bankruptcy judge in Florida ruled earlier this week that photos taken in 1946 of Norma Jeane Dougherty — who went on to become the iconic Monroe — will be sold at auction to settle the debts of the photographer.
Joseph Jasgur's photos, negatives and image copyrights will be sold in December by Julien's Auctions. The collection also includes several model-release forms Dougherty signed for Jasgur in Hollywood.
Darren Julien, chief of Julien's Auctions, said the photos have not been widely distributed and the collection has been locked up in court battles for more than two decades. He said the sale is significant because "it's very rare to see something where you can buy a copyrighted image of (Monroe), especially of her first photo shoot."
"It's really hard to put a value on something like this, because it's rare and not just for the collector," he said, noting that the owner of the copyrights will be able to sell and distribute the images. "These are probably the most significant images of Marilyn that are available because they're so early, from the first part of her career, and it's rare to have images like these where you're selling the rights, too."
He declined to estimate how much the images and copyrights will sell for at the company's "Icons & Idols" auction, to be held Dec. 2-4 in Beverly Hills, California.
The photos include a black-and-white headshot of the future Monroe wearing a jaunty beret, another of her in a halter top and a color picture of her smiling in a striped bikini on the sand. Julien said Jasgur was hired by the Blue Book modeling agency to shoot the then-unknown Norma Jeane.
As the spokesmodel for Dior, Charlize Theron and her amazingly good looks graced the latest ad for J'Adore perfume. But she wasn't the only memorable face.
The high-fashion company decided to try and use modern-day technology in order to revive some of Hollywood's greatest icons and include them in the campaign.
The spot follows Theron as she rushes to get dressed—swapping her streetwear for a beautiful gold gown, natch—at a fashion show at Versailles' Hall of Mirrors. By splicing footage through CGI, legendary actresses Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich exchange glances and even some conversation with Charlize backstage, making the spot both eerie and fascinating.
"It was incredibly glamorous and fantastic. I don't think I'll experience something like that again in my lifetime," Theron told The Hollywood Reporter.
Enough already! Watch the ad!
In the movie, Eddie Redmayne plays an assistant tasked with helping Marilyn Monroe through the shoot of 1956's "The Prince and the Showgirl" and, in the process, documenting the "tense" interactions between Monroe and co-star Laurence Olivier (played here by Kenneth Branagh).
Michelle Williams stars as the iconic Hollywood actress. An all-star cast backs her up, including Branagh, Emma Watson, Judi Dench and Julia Ormond.
The poster features a platinum blonde Williams, along with Redmayne, in an ice-blue dress set against a black-and-white backdrop of swarming paparazzi.
In a newly released photo from the upcoming My Week With Marilyn, Michelle Williams, who plays Monroe in the flick, proves she can look exactly like the iconic blond bombshell...
Williams looks radiant in the shot with a platinum blond 'do and wearing a white body-hugging dress, coat and black sunglasses. With purse and flowers in hand, she walks through a crowd of men while photogs swarm her on all sides.
"She was brilliant," William's costar Dominic Cooper told us earlier this year of the star's performance in the flick. "She did a lot of the work. It was amazing to watch the transformation."
My Week With Marilyn tells the real life story of an assistant (Eddie Redmayne) to Sir Laurence Olivier who was given the task of showing Monroe around England while she was there filming The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. The film, also starring Emma Watson and Julia Ormond, will hit theaters on Nov. 4 after having its world premiere about a month before during the New York Film Festival.
Now we want to hear from you. Are you as excited as we are to see Michelle as Marilyn?
The auction was a flop. Nobody came forward willing to pay Mikel Barsa's starting price of 2 million Argentine pesos, about $480,000.
Barsa said it didn't help matters that a spokeswoman for Monroe's estate was quoted in an Associated Press interview calling the whole thing a fraud.
"It doesn't surprise me. The latest statements of Nancy Carlson didn't do anything good for all this," Barsa said, referring to the spokeswoman for a company in charge of protecting Monroe's image and estate.
Barsa said he was still negotiating with an unidentified buyer from Denver whom he said was offering much less than a fair price. But he also said his lawyers were reviewing the matter now that Monroe's protectors warned they would sue him if the sale went through.
Barsa claimed before the auction that the scratchy, black-and-white, six-minute 8-mm film shows the young actress, known then as Norma Jeane Baker, around 1946 or 1947 when she was poor and desperate to break into show business.
Experts on Monroe's life, however, said it's highly unlikely that the smiling young blonde in the film is her.
Comparing the film with known Monroe images leaves ample room for doubt. And several documents Barsa said proved his argument — a letter from the American Film Institute and what looks like a declassified FBI file that mentions a 1965 attempt to sell an alleged Marilyn Monroe sex film — are inconclusive.
Monroe's image and estate is protected by the brand development and licensing company Authentic Brands Group. Its spokeswoman, Carlson, said a sale of the film would invite legal action for "perpetrating a fraud on the public, violating the Monroe estate's exclusive rights to her image and other claims of intellectual property infringement."
"To me personally, it doesn't even resemble her," Carlson said.
The film will screen at Alice Tully Hall on October 9 as part of the 49th NYFF, which runs from September 30 through October 16.
Based on the diaries of a young production assistant, Colin Clark (played by Eddie Redmayne), the film deals with a week on the set of the 1956 film "The Prince and the Showgirl," which starred Monroe and Olivier. Dougray Scott plays Monroe's husband, playwright Arthur Miller; the film was directed by Simon Curtis, and also stars Dominic Cooper, Judi Dench, Julia Ormond and Emma Watson.
The festival also announced its lineup of Masterworks presentations, which consist of a digitally restored version of William Wyler's 1959 epic "Ben-Hur," a screening of Nicholas Ray's experimental "We Can't Go Home Again" from 1973, and a 36-film retrospective covering the 100 years of Japan's Nikkatsu Films, which will include "The Burmese Harp" (1956), "Cold Fish" (2010), "Singing Love Birds" (1936), "Pigs and Battleships" (1961), "Tokyo Drifter" (1966) and some of the soft-core "Roman Porno" films Nikkatsu released in the 1970s.
NYFF announced last week that the festival will open with the North American premiere of Roman Polanski's "Carnage," featuring Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet.
A Marilyn Monroe expert, however, says the actress in the film is someone else, considerably heavier and less feminine than the legendary film star.
"That's not Marilyn. The chin is not the same, the lips are not the same, the teeth are not the same," said Scott Fortner, who has a sizeable collection of Monroe memorabilia, including a belt he said proves how much more petite she was. "Marilyn was a tiny little thing. And I know that for a fact. I own her clothing."
Collector Mikel Barsa said in an interview Wednesday that he wants at least $500,000 for the sexually explicit 6½-minute, grainy black-and-white film, which he says was made before 1947, when Monroe was not yet 21.
He said it's an exact copy of a 16-mm film discovered more than a decade ago. Barsa brokered a sale of that film to a European magazine in 1997, which he said in turn sold some 600,000 copies before a collector bought the original 16-mm reel for $1.2 million. Copies of that version are still circulating on the Internet.
"People with romantic notions have denied that it's Marilyn Monroe, and have invented stories" to raise doubts about the film, Barsa said in his Buenos Aires office, which is lined with pictures from his days as a concert promoter. "This film shows the real Marilyn Monroe — it was only later that the studios discovered her and transformed her."
The face of the woman in the film looks considerably different from the Monroe who emerged later as a star, but more similar to the Monroe seen in one of her first movies, 1949's "Love Happy," which shows the actress before she lost weight, added a beauty spot on her left cheek and became one of Hollywood's most enduring stars.
Barsa said he has no idea how the two original copies ended up in the hands of the people who sought his help selling them, and he refused to identify any of the principals involved. He said that in the 1940s, sex films were often made using side-by-side 16-mm and 8-mm cameras, since audiences used both formats.
The collector said that Mark Roesler of Indianapolis-based CMG Worldwide, which has managed the image and estate of Monroe, threatened to sue after the earlier version surfaced in 1997. Barsa said nothing ever came of it after the owners offered to sell the film to CMG.
Roesler didn't respond Wednesday to two emails and a phone call requesting comment.
Barsa says he plans to auction the film himself Aug. 7 at a memorabilia collectors fair that he has organized in Buenos Aires, and is hoping for publicity similar to the scandal he generated when he screened the 16-mm version at a similar fair in Madrid in 1997. News coverage of his auction is already creating another buzz on the Internet.
His part of the deal is a 10 percent sales commission, he said.
A variety of sexually explicit films and pictures have been attributed to Monroe over the years, fostering a long and unresolved debate.
"In the Marilyn community, people have debated this for years and years and for the most part it's widely believed that this is not her," Fortner said.
Still, even Fortner said Monroe's image changed considerably as she became a star — that she had some plastic surgery, learned how to hold her face differently in modeling school and adopted a mole on her left cheek. "I actually think it moved from time to time," Fortner said.
Monroe died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1962 at 36.
The 26-foot tall artwork was unveiled in Chicago, Illinois earlier this month but it has been savaged by critics for encouraging "juvenile" picture opportunities.
Richard Roeper, a journalist with the Chicago Sun-Times, has branded the statue "hideous" and writes, "Even worse than the sculpture itself is the photo-op behaviour it's inspiring. Men (and women) licking Marilyn's leg, gawking up her skirt, pointing at her giant panties as they leer and laugh. It's not that the sculpture is shocking or sexist or obscene - but it's definitely bringing out the juvenile goofball in many of us."
Roeper also demands to know why the statue has been placed in Chicago when the iconic scene - in which Monroe's flowing dress is blown around her waist as she stands over a subway grate - was shot in New York.
The statue, by artist Seward Johnson, will be displayed in Chicago until spring next year.
As dozens of people watched Friday, a 26-foot-tall sculpture of Monroe in her famous pose from the film "The Seven Year Itch" was unveiled on Chicago's Magnificent Mile. In the film, a draft catches Monroe's dress as she passes over a subway grate.
Many in the crowd that descended on the plaza throughout the day — including a tuxedo-clad wedding party — wasted little time positioning themselves under the movie star's dress to catch a subway-level view and take pictures with their cell phone cameras. Not that Monroe, her eyes closed and a sublime smile on her face, seemed to notice.
Some of those who took pictures of the sculpture called "Forever Marilyn" were surprised when they came around the side and back of the sculpture and saw honest-to-goodness lace panties on the movie icon. The film scene and photographs taken from it left much more to the imagination than artist Seward Johnson's sculpture.
"I would have expected to see something flat there, and we wouldn't see her undergarments," said Trisha Feely, 41, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. "It's a little intrusive."
"It reveals what everybody was always thinking," said her husband, Terry Feely, 42.
Chicago has a history of public art displays, including a herd of fiberglass cows that lined Michigan Avenue some years back. The plaza where Monroe will be stationed until next spring was the home a few years ago to another Johnson sculpture: the equally iconic, though far less glamorous, farmer and his spinster daughter from Grant Wood's "American Gothic."
The Monroe sculpture isn't even the first piece of public art that people can stand under and look up at — though nobody who visits the Picasso a few blocks away quite knows what they're seeing.
Marilyn, though, is a different story.
"Thank God, she has panties," said Wanda Taylor, voicing the relief of a mother who wouldn't have to spend the next several hours answering questions from her 9-year-old son, Kendall Sculfield. "They're clean and white, so I'm happy."
In fact, just about the only ones who weren't happy with the view were Kendall and his 11-year-old buddy Raymond Qualls — who made sure everybody understood that when he took his picture, it was from the front of the sculpture and not behind or under it.
"I think her dress should be down," said Kendall, as Raymond nodded in agreement.
Trisha Feely suggested someone else would agree with the boys: Monroe's ex-husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio.
"I wonder what he would think," she said.
DiMaggio was reported to have been upset during the filming of the scene in 1954, and the couple divorced a few months later.
But 52-year-old Pam Jennelle, of Orlando, Fla., couldn't understand how anyone could be offended or uncomfortable with the sculpture.
"They're perfectly proper white lace panties," she said.
Besides, she said, the sculpture, particularly the look on Monroe's face, captured the magic that people still feel a half century after the movie star's death.
"She's beautiful," she said. "How can you not love Marilyn Monroe?"
The actual white dress worn by Monroe in the scene from director Billy Wilder's 1955 film that helped make her a screen legend sold for $4.6 million at an auction last month of Hollywood costumes and props collected by film star Debbie Reynolds.
The dress, worn by the star in the 1955 film "The Seven Year Itch," had been expected to fetch between one and two million dollars.
But the sale Saturday, part of a collection of Hollywood memorabilia held by actress Debbie Reynolds, saw Monroe's "subway" dress -- now cream colored from age -- sold for $4.6 million (or $5,520,000, with added fees).
The entire sale, which included other Monroe garbs, was valued at $22.8 million, Nancy Seltzer, a spokeswoman for auction house Profiles in History, told AFP in an email.
Signed by the American designer William Travilla, the pleated ivory dress contributed in part to Monroe's enduring image as a 20th Century sex symbol.
It was the highest value feature of the auction that also some 700 pieces go under the hammer.
Among them were dresses Monroe wore in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1953) and "The River of No Return" (1954), as well as costumes from other classic Hollywood staples "Gone With the Wind," "The Sound of Music," "Cleopatra," "Ben-Hur," "The Wizard of Oz," and "My Fair Lady."
Reynolds, a singer, dancer and actress whose greatest role came in "Singin' in the Rain," began collecting Hollywood memorabilia in the 1970s when MGM Studios liquidated its assets. Her immense collection includes over 3,500 costumes, 20,000 photographs and hundreds of props and other decorations.
A second sale from the Reynolds collection is planned for December.
A New York-based technology company is raising funds to buy the dress when it comes up for auction later this month in Los Angeles and to bring it home to New York to be placed on permanent display, possibly in a museum.
Profiles in History, the auction house handling the sale, says the dress is worth between $1 million and $2 million.
"The dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in 'The Seven Year Itch' is as much a part of her iconic image as her stunning beauty," Darlene Newman, a co-founder of inQuicity, a smartphone app producer organizing the effort, said in a statement.
"It's also a prolific piece of New York City's vivid history and culture, and deserves to find a permanent home here."
The company has set up a web page, www.savethedress.org, to attract donors, who will be credited in any exhibition of the dress.
The dress is currently owned by the movie star Debbie Reynolds, and is part of her large collection of Hollywood costumes and props being auctioned off on June 18. Other items include costumes from "The Wizard of Oz", "Gone With the Wind" and "Cleopatra."
The estate of William Travilla, the Academy Award-winning designer who created the dress, has lent its support to inQuicity's campaign.
Monroe originally filmed the scene while standing over a subway grate on Lexington Avenue near 52nd Street in Manhattan, surrounded by a huge crowd of photographers and onlookers. The crowd noise was so loud that Billy Wilder, the director of the 1955 film, was forced to re-shoot the scene on a soundstage.
If successful in its bid, inQuicity says it will take the dress on a national tour before placing it on permanent display in New York City at a yet undisclosed location.
Anton Fury has hung on to the folder of never-before-seen negatives of the late Hollywood starlet for about three decades.
"That was probably my greatest garage sale discovery ever," Fury told CNN of his Parsippany, N.J., find.
Fury said he didn't know who the woman in the negatives was until he looked at them more closely at home.
The black and white photos feature poolside images of a young Monroe in a bikini and wedge sandals.
Also in the folder were negatives of actress Jayne Mansfield.
To try to discover more about the mystery photos, Fury met with art dealer David W. Streets in Los Angeles this week and released a handful of prints, thought to be taken in Hollywood in 1950 when Monroe was 24 years old.
In the photos, of both Monroe and Mansfield, is the same unknown man. He could be the photographer.
"We know that Monroe and Mansfield were here working at the same time, were contemporaries and friends," Streets said. "So, there's an intertanglement there that we're going to unravel and see where the mystery leads."
Monroe's subway dress from "The Seven Year Itch," Judy Garland's blue cotton dress and ruby red slippers from "The Wizard of Oz" and Charlie Chaplin's "Tramp" bowler hat are among the 3,500 items up for auction in Beverly Hills on June 18.
Barbra Streisand's sleeveless gold velvet, jeweled gown from "Hello, Dolly" -- said to be the most expensive dress ever made for a film -- will also be up for sale as will Audrey Hepburn's Ascot dress from "My Fair Lady" and Julie Andrews' costumes from "The Sound of Music."
Reynolds, 79, who starred in such films as "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," has been collecting film memorabilia for more than 50 years.
She got more serious about it when in 1970, Hollywood movie studio MGM announced it was going to auction off everything except its real estate. Reynolds, who had been under contract at MGM, purchased many items and continued to save as many pieces as she could over the years.
Her collection was due to have been housed in a planned museum, her spokeswoman said. But the project fell through and Reynolds has decided to sell her collection.
The collection will be on view to the public at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills in early June before the auction on June 18.
The actress snubbed director Simon Curtis when he asked her to play the screen icon in upcoming biopic My Week With Marilyn, but after eventually accepting, she admits the role proved to be more daunting than she'd imagined.
Williams tells Britain's Daily Mail, "I knew I wouldn't be able to resist, eventually... Physically and vocally, everything about her is different from me.
"I've kind of gone to school and had teachers to help me understand Marilyn, so I could project an essence of her.
"When I first approached the part, I thought that there were three, even four parts to Marilyn. It rearranges you, it shifts your molecules, lifts you up, spins you around, puts you back down and you're not quite the same, for better or for worse."
And the blonde beauty insists her performance has brought her closer to the Some Like It Hot star, who died in 1962.
She adds, "I feel like we live together... At a certain point, something else does take over. I don't quite feel myself these days.”
A Dali watercolor of a reclining nude that hung in Hugh Hefner's bedroom is among 125 artworks being auctioned by the magazine known for baring all for nearly 60 years. The Dec. 8 auction at Christie's is dubbed "The Year of the Rabbit."
Founder and editor-in-chief Hefner said the magazine that has entertained, titillated and informed with its commissioned art has blurred the lines between fine and popular art.
"Playboy helped to change the very direction of commercial art — breaking down the wall between fine art and commercial art," the 84-year-old Hefner told The Associated Press in an interview at his Los Angeles mansion. "Before Playboy and a few other places, commercial art was essentially Norman Rockwell, very realistic. And we introduced into commercial illustration the whole notion of everything from abstract to semi-abstract to stuff that you found on a gallery wall."
The sale includes 80 photographs, more than a dozen contemporary works and 24 cartoons.
Among them are a photograph of comedian Dan Aykroyd in a conehead costume with a bunny-suited Anderson, a photo of the magazine's 1953 debut cover of Monroe, an early 1960s shot of sex kitten Brigitte Bardot and three Alberto Vargas pinup girl watercolor and pencil illustration boards. The auction's top draw is expected to be an iconic, sexually charged oil of a scarlet-lipstick mouth by pop artist Tom Wesselmann. Portraits of Duke Ellington and Dennis Hopper and a Herb Ritts photo of Elle Macpherson are also for sale.
"It's the tip of the iceberg," said Aaron Baker, curator of the Playboy Art Collection for the last eight years. Chicago-based Playboy houses an archive of 5,000 contemporary artworks and more than 20 million photographs in a storage building in the city.
Since "a lot of these are work products," said Cathy Elkies, Christie's head of private and corporate collections, "there's a link between the collection and the ethos of the publication itself."
Nearly all the items in the sale have appeared in the publication, a cultural icon that helped liberate American sexual mores.
Given Hefner's early background as an amateur cartoonist, Elkies said, his connection to art has always been strong.
Among the standout fine art pieces is Dali's "Playmate," a 1966 watercolor of a reclining nude that until recently hung over a mantel in Hefner's bedroom at the Playboy Mansion. It's estimated to bring $100,000 to $150,000. It was one of 11 works chosen for "The Playmate as Fine Art" pictorial for the magazine's January 1967 Playmate review issue that asked artists to create Playmate-inspired art.
"I'm a fan of Dali's and happy to be sharing it," Hefner said, smiling. "It's a reclining nude, so that made it easy to personally identify with it."
The star of the auction, Wesselmann's "Mouth No. 8," depicts the artist's iconic theme of a woman's open, lipsticked mouth. The 1966 work is estimated to bring $2 million to $3 million.
"It's a great example of his work from his best period," Baker said.
Some fun items include a number of layout boards, marked up by Playboy's art directors. Some even contain their penciled ratings of the pinups, for example, "88 out of 100," Elkies said.
A Stephen Wayda 1996 cover photograph of Playmate of the Year Stacy Sanchez draped in white fabric in the shape of Playboy's bunny logo is initialed by Hefner and contains editorial comments like "move leg to this position" and "missing eye shadow."
The boards "really take you behind the scenes and show the editorial process," Baker said.
The sale has a number of Monroe images, including a photograph that was used for the cover of Playboy's December 1953 premiere issue. The magazine purchased it from United Press, shot during a parade of Monroe riding on the back of a car. Playboy swapped out the background of a crowd for its own logo.
It shows Monroe with her arm raised "almost as if she was waving to the readers, inviting them into the pages of the book of these incredible nude shots of her that they had never seen before," Baker said.
"You know, it becomes a piece of art because it appears on the cover of Playboy," Hefner noted. "One of the things that set Playboy apart from the very beginning was not simply the pretty ladies and the very good literature, but the fact that we were winning art awards in the very first year."
The UP credit appears on the back of the print, which is estimated to fetch $10,000 to $15,000.
An early 1960s print of a demure-looking Bardot in bikini bottoms and hands across her breasts is expected to fetch $4,000 to $6,000. The photographer is unknown.
Original famous centerfolds of Anna Nicole Smith, Jenny McCarthy and Anderson are also included. But not all the material focuses on the erogenous, especially a white plaster cast by George Segal of a pregnant woman seated in a folding chair that was part of the "Playmate of Fine Art" pictorial.
The work is not sensuous, but "for Segal the most beautiful type of woman is one with child," said Baker. The woman is the wife of artist Alfred Leslie, whose work also appeared in the pictorial.
"It's a fun sale ... (that) reflects the spirit of the magazine in a very meaningful and personal way," Elkies said.
Also for sale: a 1970 portrait of Hefner in his signature smoking jacket and pipe. Commissioned for the old Playboy mansion in Chicago in the late 1960s, Playboy Enterprise inherited it after Hefner moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. It has a $5,000 to $7,000 estimate.
The December sale marks the second time Christie's has sold items from Playboy. On its 50th anniversary in 2003, Christie's offered memorabilia and ephemera from Playboy's collection.
"This one's really more about the art," said Elkies of the December sale.
Williams, 30, who earned an Oscar nomination for her 2005 role in "Brokeback Mountain" and also appeared in "Shutter Island", stars as Monroe alongside a British cast that sees Kenneth Branagh as Olivier, Julia Ormond playing actress Vivien Leigh and Judi Dench in the role of British screen veteran Dame Sybil Thorndike.
"My Week with Marilyn" chronicles a week in the life of Monroe as she escapes her Hollywood routine and is introduced to the pleasures of 1950s Britain by an assistant on the set of "The Prince and the Showgirl".
British actor Derek Jacobi, and young stars Dominic Cooper and Emma Watson of "Harry Potter" fame, will also appear, with Simon Curtis directing.
Work on the co-production between BBC Films, Trademark Films and the Weinstein Company has already started at Britain's Pinewood Studios, producers said.
The movie is the second planned film treatment of Monroe -- still one of the world's best-known sex symbols more than 40 years after her death.
Australian Naomi Watts is due to play Monroe in the Hollywood movie "Blonde" based on U.S. writer Joyce Carol Oates' 2000 fictional biography of the star. "Blonde" is expected to start shooting in early 2012.
The movie icon detailed her feelings of torment in a number of writings, left to her New York acting mentor Lee Strasberg, in which she complains about the loneliness of working in Hollywood and explains her anguish about her troubled love life.
In an entry following the breakdown of her marriage to baseball star Joe DiMaggio, she asks herself why she "always felt in a certain way that I am subhuman, why in other words, I am the worst. Even physically, I have always been sure that something was not right with me."
But her muddled state of mind is shown in a note penned after the collapse of her second marriage, to playwright Aurthur Miller in 1958.
She wrote, "Help, help, help. I feel life approaching when all that I want is to die."
Monroe died from a drug overdose in 1962.
Fragments is set to hit book retailers later this month.
Like other residents of the small northern Nevada town of Dayton, she had no clue of the demons that drove Monroe to be consistently late on the set, causing frustrating delays for director John Huston and co-stars Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.
"She was gorgeous, very sweet, naive," recalled VanCleave, who was a $10-a-day extra during a rodeo scene. "She wasn't snobby. She seemed real down to earth and friendly."
In testimony to the public's enduring fascination with Monroe, VanCleave and other locals will gather Saturday and Sunday in Dayton, about 40 miles southeast of Reno, to mark the 50th anniversary of filming for the last complete movie for both Monroe and Gable.
The celebration will include a Monroe and Gable look-alike contest, a display of photographs of the stars taken in Dayton, a session of old-timers' reminiscences about the filming, and tours of the old bar where a light-hearted scene was shot of a bouncing Monroe playing paddleball to the delight of male patrons.
Residents of Dayton, then an agricultural community of about 250, turned out en masse in 1960 to serve as extras or watch the filming, and those who are still around rave about the cast's friendliness and accessibility. The town has since mushroomed into a Reno bedroom community of more than 10,000.
"It was a big deal to have these Hollywood legends in town for a month or so. It's a source of pride for us," said Laura Tennant of the Historical Society of Dayton Valley, the celebration's sponsor.
Filmed almost exclusively around Dayton and Reno in July-October 1960, the movie was plagued by almost daily delays caused by Monroe's pill-popping to fall asleep and wake up, said Curtice Taylor, a New York photographer and son of "Misfits" producer Frank Taylor.
The producer would occasionally send his 12-year-old son to her trailer to check on her readiness, thinking a child would be less threatening than an adult, said Taylor, who witnessed most of the filming with his family.
"Nobody said anything to her about the delays," Taylor said. "It could have made things worse. She was the star and she was incredibly vulnerable."
Eli Wallach, 94, the only surviving cast member, said Huston told the actors not to complain about Monroe's tardiness because it would cause her to cease functioning.
"Huston got us together and said he couldn't make the movie without Marilyn," Wallach told The Associated Press. "Marilyn had a lot of problems with time, but I never said anything that would make her unhappy. What could I do? She tried her best."
Unlike Monroe, the focused Gable memorized his lines the night before and showed up on the set on time each morning, Taylor said.
"Clark Gable was bored. He was going crazy with the delays," he said.
Filming also was delayed by Monroe's growing drug use that prompted her to seek treatment in Los Angeles. At the time, Huston realized the drugs were giving her a vacant look and taking away her ability to "seduce the camera," Taylor said.
"In one scene while walking down the street on Clift's arm in Dayton, she had the smile of a stoned person," he said. "It's not the 1,000-watt smile she usually had. The wattage wasn't there."
The delays helped make "The Misfits" — written by her then-husband, Arthur Miller — one of the most expensive black-and-white films ever made. She and Miller took separate rooms during the filming and divorced a short time later.
Monroe also was troubled by an unhappy childhood, a miscarriage, the stress of doing three movies in a row without rest and the pressure of tackling such serious material, Taylor added.
"There was a lot of pressure on a woman who was not very strong to begin with," he said. "A lot of stuff was converging on her. It's remarkable they finished the movie."
Despite an all-star cast and acclaimed director, "The Misfits" didn't live up to Frank Taylor's hopes for the "ultimate motion picture," said former Nevada state Archivist Guy Rocha.
The dark, deep movie about the inner struggles of a group of fictional Nevada misfits was considered odd by the public and many critics, he said.
"It ended up a disappointment," Rocha said. "It didn't capture the public's imagination. So much more was expected from the movie as far as financial return and critical acclaim."
But the film has developed a cult following since the deaths of its stars, who played characters much like themselves, Rocha said. The movie centers on an insecure, lonely divorcee played by Monroe, an aging but sensitive cowboy (Gable) and a troubled but kind rodeo rider (Clift).
"What happens over time is this movie begins to get a following because of what happened after the filming," Rocha said. "The movie freezes Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in time, and has a haunting quality."
Just 12 days after filming ended, Gable died of a heart attack at age 59. Less than 21 months later, Monroe died of a drug overdose at age 36 in what was ruled a suicide. Clift appeared in several other films before he died at age 45 in 1966.
Wallach hailed the trio's performances, called the movie "extraordinary" and said it was one of the most fascinating experiences of his long Hollywood career.
"I was working with marvelous actors like Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, great, great people," he said. "I was captivated by the role Marilyn played in the movie. Clark Gable was an extraordinary man, gentle and sweet. I feel lucky to have been in the film with them."
VanCleave said she and other Dayton residents also cherish their brush with the actors.
"We thought the whole cast was wonderful, larger than life," she said. "But to be honest, I never thought it was a very good movie."
Who wants all this stuff? And why would they pay thousands of dollars for it?
Hollywood memorabilia auctions have become big business around the globe, with a seemingly endless supply of celebrity relics — and celebrity collectors who will pay big bucks for them. In what's become almost routine around town, hundreds more items will be up for sale this weekend, when props and costumes from TV's "Lost" hit the auction block.
"This market is fun because it's probably the most accessible market that's sold at auction today," said appraiser Laura Woolley, president of The Collector's Lab. "You don't need to have a huge history of connoisseurship to get the visceral reaction to the ruby slippers, and you don't need to be told why they're important. These pieces just have an instant connection with people."
For collector David Davis, it all started with Streisand's houndstooth cap.
Davis heard on the "Today" show that the wool cap she wore in 1972's "What's Up, Doc?" was going up for auction a few years ago, and on a whim, he called and placed a bid.
"I thought I could never possibly afford or win something that Barbra Streisand wore in a movie," he said. "I thought it was out of my league."
But his bid won the cap. Five years later, his collection includes several Streisand costumes, along with those worn by Cher, Carol Burnett and Paul McCartney. Davis displays the iconic outfits around his home on mannequins custom-made to look like the stars.
While Davis says his collection obsession "is bordering on insanity," the 58-year-old is at the heart of a booming business.
"What keeps this industry alive are the fans who love this stuff," said Darren Julien of Julien's Auctions, which specializes in celebrity memorabilia (and famously sold Michael Jackson's bejeweled glove for $420,000 to a buyer from Hong Kong last year).
"Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Cafe popularized the idea of what memorabilia was," explains Joseph Maddalena, president and owner of Profiles in History, which will administer the "Lost" auction in Santa Monica. "It's the same exact thing as what you'd do with a Van Gogh: You buy it, hang it on the wall and look at it. It's pride of ownership, the bragging rights and the fact that you want to own them."
"There's something about having it in your house, in your possession," said Davis, who's spent $300,000 on his collection . "You feel a connection to the celebrity."
Other collectors see themselves as custodians of history. Scott Fortner has been collecting Marilyn Monroe books and photos since he was a kid. One of those books was an auction catalog, and it inspired him to place bids and start buying Monroe's costumes, clothing and keepsakes.
Fortner doesn't display the items at home because they're fragile and sensitive to light. But he has lent his vast collection to museums, including an exhibition at the Hollywood Museum that closes Aug. 31.
"I feel more like a curator, a holder of Marilyn's goods, rather than buying them to be close to her," he said.
But he's not immune to the intoxicating charm of her celebrity: "It's pretty amazing to be able to hold a garment or article of clothing that still has Marilyn's perfume on it and you can smell what she smelled like."
None of the collectors interviewed for this story saw their purchases as financial investments. Though Julien tells a story of a Michael Jackson fan who bought one of the pop star's jackets for $4,000 in 1989 and sold it this year for $271,000, auction experts agree that collecting celebrity memorabilia is more for the fun than for the money.
"You can't look at any of this stuff as an investment," said Kathleen Guzman, a longtime auctioneer and appraiser who works for "Antiques Roadshow." "These are sentimental purchases that may or may not retain their value in the long term."
Greg Schreiner, who has amassed a collection of more than 350 Hollywood costumes since moving to Los Angeles in 1979, said he couldn't imagine parting with a single one.
"They're like my children," he said. "I love them all."
Some collectors eventually sell their prized pieces. The ruby slippers from "Wizard of Oz" have been sold several times (most recently for over $600,000). A few Marilyn Monroe items sold at a Christie's estate sale in 1999 are back on the market.
A bad economy could inspire some to sell, Woolley said. Generational changes, too, affect what's valuable and what's popular.
It used to be that collectors sought only old Hollywood memorabilia, she said, but now modern day props and costumes can generate just as much interest. More recent celebrity memorabilia is often more affordable, too.
Because nostalgia drives the celebrity memorabilia market, emotion could overtake reason for some shoppers, inviting fraud, Woolley said. Collectors who aren't scrupulous with their research could, for example, think the reissued "Gone With the Wind" poster they just bought is actually an original from the 1939 film.
Fortner, the Monroe collector, said he always does extensive research on any item he's considering buying. Generally, though, it's up to the auction house to verify authenticity, said auctioneer Guzman, and it may provide documentation or photos to prove an item's provenance.
Where art auctions might be intimidating, memorabilia auctions are marked by a colorful energy, Guzman said, perhaps inspired by all that celebrity love.
"I'm sure people who buy contemporary paintings are passionate, but they just don't seem to be as dramatic," she said. "It's about a psychic connection... I think people identify with these stars and feel that owning something of them is like a magic talisman toward sharing their lives."
It is signature Avedon. Dramatic but playful, an image shot on a hot summer day in 1955 at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris.
An exhibition-size print of the famous picture, "Dovima with elephants," will be sold this fall in Paris, together with more than 60 other photographs, Christie's auction house said Friday. It is estimated to sell for $500,000 to $700,000 (euro 400,000 to 600,000). The total Avedon collection is expected to bring $3.7 million to $6 million (euro 3 million to 5 million).
New York-based Avedon Foundation, the largest repository of Avedon works, is for the first time selling photographs from its archive to establish an endowment to promote the work and legacy of the master fashion photographer and portraitist of such famous people as Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles and Malcolm X.
The foundation and Christie's said it was the largest number of Avedon works to ever come on the market.
Avedon, whose career spanned 60 years, died in 2004 at the age of 81 while on assignment in Texas for The New Yorker. He is famous for creating ultra-choreographed tableaux that seem serendipitous, with elegantly attired models leaping, jumping and dancing across the page. His influence in the fashion world was immense and helped pave the era of the supermodel through his work with Jean Shrimpton, Veruschka and Twiggy.
The Nov. 20 sale will be in Paris, a city with whom the native New Yorker had a decades-long connection, shooting couture collections for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. It will coincide with the monthlong Photo Paris festival.
Christie's made the announcement to The Associated Press before the Rencontres d'Arles photography extravaganza of exhibitions and events in the south of France next week.
"Richard Avedon is by any standards a towering figure in the story of photography," said Philippe Garner, Christie's head of 20th-century decorative arts and photographs. "His work has power, authority and intensity, very distinctive signature."
He called "Dovima" — the name of one of Avedon's favorite models — "absolutely emblematic of that kind of flair, that pizazz he injected into fashion photography."
Paul Roth, executive director of the Avedon Foundation, said the "Dovima" was the crown jewel of the sale — and the largest exhibition print of the image ever made. Measuring 88 inches by 60 inches, it was shown on the national tour of Avedon's 1978 Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion retrospective. It was also the print that for two decades greeted visitors to Avedon's New York City studio.
Avedon left strict instructions detailing the foundation's purpose. It was established a year after his death "as his intended vehicle for continuing his legacy" and supporting visual arts and photographic education, Roth said.
In a 1973 interview, Avedon said, "There's always been a separation between fashion and what I call my 'deeper' work. Fashion is where I make my living. ... Then there's the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits."
People from Marilyn Monroe to Michael Moore coveted having their portraits taken by the photographer, whose signature style was known simply as "The Avedon Look" — unsparing, often unsmiling shots of his subjects against a minimalist white background.
A very small vintage print of a pensive-looking Monroe in a sequined dress taken in 1957 is among the portraits at Christie's. The auction house predicted it would sell for $100,000 to $150,000 (euro 80,000 to 120,000).
Among Avedon's other works was a series of images of the civil rights movement. It includes a large photo of Malcolm X, an out-of-focus print from 1963 that was made expressly for Avedon's retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993. Christie's estimates it will sell for $10,000 to $15,000 (euro 8,000 to 12,000).
Avedon's Beatles portfolio, a group of four psychedelic color pictures of each of the Fab Four made at the height of their fame in the late 1960s, is another highlight of the sale. He created nine editions of the portfolio, one of which set an Avedon auction record at a 2005 Christie's sale, bringing $464,000 (euro 383,471). The one at the upcoming sale has a pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $500,000 (euro 250,000 to 350,000).
The King Kong star will tackle the lead role in Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' imaginary Marilyn Monroe memoir which will be directed by Andrew Dominik, the moviemaker behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
The $20 million production will begin filming in January 2011, and Dominik is delighted to have found his Monroe.
He tells ScreenDaily.com, "Why is Marilyn Monroe the great female icon of the 20th Century? For men she is an object of sexual desire that is desperately in need of rescue. For women, she embodies all the injustices visited upon the feminine, a sister, a Cinderella, consigned to live among the ashes.
"I want to tell the story of Norma Jeane as a central figure in a fairytale; an orphan child lost in the woods of Hollywood, being consumed by that great icon of the twentieth century."
Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, died in 1962 at the age of 36 following a drug overdose.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux announced Tuesday that "Fragments" would come out in October. Editor Courtney Hodell said the book would include poems, photographs, reflections on third husband Arthur Miller and other men in Monroe's life, and references to works by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce and numerous other authors.
"I think the book will show that she was a really thoughtful person with a real interior life," Hodell said. "She was a great reader and someone with real writing flair. There are fragments of poetry that are really quite beautiful, lines that stop you in your tracks."
The book features a long essay about Monroe's first husband, James Dougherty; notes about acting and the roles she was working on; lists of resolutions and a letter to acting coach Lee Strasberg. Monroe wrote on everything from spiral bound notebooks to stationery from the Waldorf Astoria.
The writings date from 1943, when Monroe was a teenager, to near the end of her life. Monroe was found dead in her Los Angeles home in 1962 at age 36, her death ruled a probable suicide, although theories of murder have proliferated.
Hodell said there were passages by Monroe that "make her seem suicidal," but declined to say what years the passages were written. Hodell also declined to say whether Monroe referred to Joe DiMaggio, her second of three husbands, or President John F. Kennedy, with whom she was widely rumored to have had an affair. But Hodell did say that "there's stuff about all of her relationships here."
The book was commissioned by Anna Strasberg, who manages Monroe's estate and is Lee Strasberg's widow.
Darren Julien of Julien's Auctions says the psychiatric sofa will be offered June 26-27 during the Hollywood Legends auction at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino Las Vegas.
Other Monroe-abilia up for grabs: her Chanel No. 5, personal photos, bank statements, scripts, signed checks and the chair used in the star's final photo shoot.
The pictures, shot by photographer Len Steckler at his apartment in December 1961, had spent 45 years in a private archive.
They show Monroe, aged 35 and only nine months from death, relaxing with Sandburg, a Pulitzer-prize wining poet.
The four single images and two triptychs -- a series of three pictures each -- are listed for sale at between 1,999 dollars and 3,999 dollars.
"On a wintry afternoon, Sandburg and Steckler patiently awaited Monroe, who arrived three hours later than planned, claiming she was at the hairdresser's trying to get her hair white to match Sandburg's," dealers Eagle National Mint said.
"The two spent the rest of the afternoon bonding over conversation and cocktails, fostering a new friendship while Steckler quietly observed, his Nikon loaded with black and white film, nothing more than natural Northern light pouring through the windows."
Each print is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and is signed by Steckler.
The sale is online at www.thevisitseries.com and by phone.
The Brokeback Mountain star has reportedly been offered the lead in upcoming film My Week With Marilyn, winning the title role ahead of other actresses including Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams who are both said to have been considered for the part.
British newspaper the Daily Mail reports director Simon Curtis and producer David Parfitt picked Williams to play Monroe, but are still waiting for the Oscar-nominated star to agree.
The picture will document Monroe's time filming 1957 movie The Prince and The Showgirl with Laurence Olivier and is based on a diary kept by the film's assistant director Colin Clarke.
My Week With Marilyn is due to begin shooting in London in June.
The reel-to-reel silent, color film taken at a private home in New Jersey was recently purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $275,000 from the person who took the film, who has asked to remain anonymous.
Morgan and the person who shot the film gave Reuters permission to use it in digital form. The copyright of the image will be put up for sale on eBay later this week, Morgan said.
Morgan, a collector of historical photos, manuscripts, autographs and documents, is also working on a documentary on the death of Monroe in August 1962.
He learned of the film during his research and tracked down the owner, who kept it as part of an archive that was moved between various homes over the years. The Monroe film had been stored in an attic for three years before Morgan tracked it down.
The actress appears happy and relaxed at a small gathering of friends that Morgan dates to 1958 or 1959, based on her appearance.
"This is the late '50s so she is already very famous, but this is a personal side of her we've never seen before. People have never seen her in such a relaxed pose," Morgan said.
?At one point she is passed a cigarette and takes a puff but does not appear to inhale deeply. Later she appears to take a sniff of her own armpit and laughs about it.
The person who made the film confirmed that the cigarette contained marijuana, saying: "I got it (the pot). It was mine. It was just passed around."
"It was not a party. It was just a get-together. You know, come over and hang out."
Widow Elsie Poncher is trying to sell her husband's crypt to pay off the mortgage on her Beverly Hills home. On selling the crypt, Poncher had planned to move her husband, who died in 1986, to an adjacent crypt intended for her.
But a $4.6 million bid submitted through online auctioneer eBay Inc in August fell through when the unidentified bidder pulled out.
A second auction on eBay with a reserve price of $500,000 also failed, with a notice on the online trading website saying it had closed with no bids on the marble mausoleum where Monroe was laid to rest in 1962.
The crypt is located at the Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery, home to celebrities including Dean Martin, James Coburn, Roy Orbison, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Carl Wilson, Minnie Riperton and recent arrival Farrah Fawcett.
The space next to Monroe's vault was sold in 1992 to the publisher of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, for $75,000.
David Camel, an attorney for Elsie Poncher, who is selling her husband's crypt in a celebrity-heavy Los Angeles cemetery, said he is going through the bids to find one that qualifies.
Bidding closed on Monday, with the winning offer coming from Japan. The unidentified person then pulled out, Camel said.
To pay off the mortgage on her Beverly Hills home, Poncher is selling the crypt of her husband, who died in 1986, and will move him to an adjacent crypt intended for her.
The crypt is located at the Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery, home to such celebrities as Dean Martin, James Coburn, Roy Orbison, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Carl Wilson, Minnie Riperton and recent arrival Farrah Fawcett.
That's how much the crypt directly above the actress went for in an online auction that ended Monday.
The eBay.com listing says the space at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery above Monroe is being vacated, making room for someone else. The listing also offers the detail that the current occupant is "looking face down on" Monroe, who was laid to rest at the cemetery in 1962.
Bidding for the auction started at $500,000 on Aug 14. The final bid was $4,602,100.
The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month that the seller was Elsie Poncher, who was putting her late husband's crypt up for auction to help pay off the $1.6 million mortgage on her Beverly Hills home.
Poncher told the newspaper that her husband, Richard Poncher, bought the crypt from Monroe's former husband, Joe DiMaggio, during his 1954 divorce from Monroe. Her husband died 23 years ago at 81.
Jolene Mason, the cemetery's general manager, told the newspaper there is one empty crypt left in the mausoleum where Monroe is buried, available for $250,000 and located two spots above the actress and to the left.
A message left for Poncher was not returned Monday.
But she earlier said that, when she sells the crypt, she'll put her husband's remains in the one reserved for her, and when her time comes, she'll be cremated.
Elsie Poncher has put an advertisement on eBay to auction off the tomb in Westwood Village Memorial Park, Los Angeles.
"Here is a once in a lifetime and into eternity opportunity to spend your eternal days directly above Marilyn Monroe," says the advertisement.
"In fact the person occupying the address right now is looking face down on her."
The burial plot is currently occupied by the late Richard Poncher, described by his widow as an entrepreneur who bought two tombs from baseball player Joe DiMaggio, Monroe's ex-husband, as the pair were divorcing in 1954.
Monroe died at the age of 36 in 1962. Poncher died at the age of 81 in 1986.
Elsie Poncher said she would move her husband's remains over one spot into a crypt intended as her final resting place if the sale is successful, and she would be cremated instead when the time comes.
Bidding for the plot opened at $500,000 and had reached $2.5 million by Sunday. No one from eBay was immediately available to comment on the bidding process or to give more details.
Poncher told the Los Angeles Times that she hoped to raise enough money to pay off the $1.6 million mortgage on her Beverly Hills home.
"I can't be more honest than that," she told the newspaper. "I want to leave it free and clear for my kids."
The Westwood Village Memorial Park is home to many celebrities, including Dean Martin, James Coburn, Roy Orbison, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, and the recently deceased Farrah Fawcett.
Playboy's Hugh Hefner bought the crypt beside Monroe in 1992.
Monroe, then 24, had already played the girlfriend of a crooked lawyer in The Asphalt Jungle and was soon to be seen as "a graduate of the Copacabana school of dramatic art" in the Oscar-winning All About Eve. Still ahead: the subway-swept skirt in 1955's The Seven-Year Itch and her definitive comic performance, in 1959's Some Like It Hot, to say nothing of the inspiration she continues to provide Madonna and Gwen Stefani.
Julien's Auctions will also sell clothing, autographed photos and other Monroe memorabilia, including items from her Brentwood, Calif., home, and jewelry, books and other items that Presley gave to his longtime personal physician, Dr. Nick.
The items will be on view at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas before the auction begins June 26. Bids will be accepted in person, by phone and online at juliensauctions.com.
Four ultra-rare pictures of the Some Like It Hot star at the Cal Neva resort in Nevada just five days before her death have been released by legendary pianist Buddy Greco.
They were part of a set of 36 photos taken of Monroe and Frank Sinatra during the summer of 1962 - but only six remain.
The other 30 were stored in a safe-deposit box at the World Trade Center and were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks.
Greco has put the prints - four of Monroe and two of Sinatra - up for auction, with a starting bid of $7,500.
Monroe died from an overdose of barbiturates on 05 August 1962.
Not only a 1950s sex symbol, Hollywood actress and possible mistress to a couple of Kennedys, Monroe was a muse for everyone from Douglas Kirkland to Andy Warhol. Nearly 200 of the countless works inspired by the curvaceous blond bombshell are included in exhibition Marilyn Monroe: Life as a Legend, which parks at the Winnipeg Art Gallery for nearly six weeks beginning Saturday.
"First of all, she was a beautiful woman," says WAG director Stephen Borys of Monroe's artistic appeal. "Then the fact that she dies at 36, and there's even questions and controversy surrounding her life and death.
"Also, the range of people who she was associated with -- from celebrities to her hometown friends to people in the White House -- I think there's just kind of this mystique about her. Few other women have been so well documented in art in the 20th century. She was just a huge magnet."
Borys was thrilled when he managed to secure the last stop on Life as a Legend's North American tour in December, adding he "had to do some juggling" to fit it in to the WAG's calendar. Curated by private collectors in Hamburg, Germany, and toured by Washington, D.C.'s International Art & Artists, the exhibit boasts "the full gamut" of popular and lesser-known paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures and multimedia pieces devoted to Monroe -- from her days as young Norma Jean Mortensen to her three husbands (James Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller), rumoured affairs with John and Robert Kennedy and her still-mysterious death in 1962.
"The show is organized chronologically," Borys says. "It begins with a collection of early photographs and it moves as she goes into the mainstream. There are some artists, in their work, who have referenced her death."
Photographs taken by notable shooters like Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Kirkland include glam shots of Monroe's Hollywood days of starring in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like it Hot to her more seductive side -- as captured on (and inside) Playboy magazine's inaugural 1953 issue.
"Those original photographs are here," Borys says. "There is one section that is more X-rated, and because we get schools and families, it's sort of situated off the path. They're very tasteful and beautiful images; it is part of her life."
Along with Life as a Legend, gallery goers can get up close with Monroe by taking in a play or a panel discussion. Here's a rundown of upcoming WAG events that pay homage to the late It Girl:
Marilyn: Forever Blonde (March 27 - April 12): While a small-town Minnesota gal seems an unlikely impersonator for an L.A. sexpot, Borys says Moorehead native Sunny Thompson is the real deal in this glitzy stage show from Seattle. "I saw a clip of her singing Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend and I thought of (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and there are moments where you wouldn't even know which one is which." Two hours with a makeup artist and fabulous knockoffs of Monroe's famous white tutu and Barbie-pink gown complete Thompson's look for the musical romp, set during a photo shoot where, at 36, the starlet is contemplating her future. Tickets to the show -- playing at 8 p.m. Fri., Sat., April 2 - 4, 8, 9, 11 & 12 and 2 p.m. Sat., Sun., April 11 & 12 -- cost $32 - $38 and include admission to Life as a Legend.
Tours: Scholar Angela Failler talks pop culture politics and her Cultural Studies Tour (April 23 & May 7 at 7 p.m.), while Gallery guru Helen Delacretaz leads an in-depth Curator's Tour on April 26 at 2 p.m. and May 21 at 7 p.m. Drop-in exhibition tours will also be held on weekends at 2 p.m. and techno-savvy viewers can plug in for an iPod tour any time.
Films: Cinematic highlights from Monroe's career get screen time at Muriel Richardson Auditorium every Saturday in May at 2 p.m., starting on the 2nd, when her character's rocky marriage goes awry during a trip to Ontario in Niagara. Naughty Western River of No Return plays on May 9, followed by musicals There's No Business Like Show Business (May 16) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (May 23).
Sex, Politics, and Scandal, Oh My! (May 14, 7 p.m.): Public obsession with tragic female celebrities -- starting with Monroe -- is discussed in this panel chat.
On the Couch: Freud, Marilyn and the Psychology of Icons (May 28, 7 p.m.): University of Manitoba assistant psychology professor Maria Medved tries to make sense of why we idolize certain celebs.
Art After Dark (May 29, 8 p.m.): Marilyn knew how to put a sexy spin on birthday parties (right, Mr. President?), and the WAG hopes to do the same for her with this chic bash, complete with guided tours and DJs Co-op and Hunnicutt. Tickets cost $25 at the WAG or Ticketmaster.
The Pirates Of The Caribbean actor was first choice in a poll to find the most popular celebrity dates, with women choosing him as their favourite fantasy companion - beating heart-throb George Clooney into second place.
Girls Aloud beauty Cheryl Cole was top amongst the males polled, with Jennifer Aniston and British model Kelly Brook also proving popular.
The survey, for environmental charity WWF, also found that Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury and Marilyn Monroe were the three late celebrities that would be most welcome at the dinner table.
The pictures were among 2,500 erotic shots Bert Stern took of the movie star for Vogue magazine just before her drug-overdose death that year.
Two photographers approached Stern last year to make a deal involving seven film transparencies from the shoot. Stern sued because he believed the items had been stolen from him.
Photographers Donald Penny and Michael Weiss said another colleague found the transparencies in curbside garbage in Manhattan in the 1970s.
Their lawyer, Jamie Brickell, and Stern's lawyer, Stephen Weingrad, said Monday the dispute was settled "amicably."
They said nine sets of photos from the transparencies will be jointly produced and sold.
The Newton photo "Sie Kommen, (Naked and Dressed), Paris, 1981" sold for $662,500, smashing the previous 2007 record for the photographer of $380,725, while the Stern image "The Last Sitting," one of the last pictures of Monroe before her death, sold for $146,500, shattering the $63,000 mark set in 1994.
Both photos were part of the Constantiner Collection, which included the largest-ever grouping of Monroe photos to come to market, more than 100 in all. The entire Constantiner Collection fetched $7.7 million, the highest total for a single owner dedicated photographs sale, Christie's said.
"The superb results achieved for this collection demonstrate the potential of works bought with true passion and considerable connoisseurship to perform magnificently even in the present uncertain economic climate," said Philippe Garner, Christie's international head of photographs, in a statement.
"The results also confirm the central position that Helmut Newton has rightly been accorded as a master photographer of the 20th century, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe's magical appeal has proven to be truly timeless," he said.
Leon and Michaela Constantiner began buying photos of glamour and style icons in the early 1990s. Their collection also includes works William Klein, Herb Ritts, Irving Penn, and scores of prints by Newton, including several life-size nudes estimated at up to $600,000.
Many of the images are already well-known. They appeared in mass market media and helped define the post-war period, Garner said. That contrasts with much contemporary photography, which is made for galleries and museums, rather than destined for magazines.
Since the turn of the millennium, digital photography has taken over from a chemical-based process, so prints available in the art market now are a part of history.
A spokeswoman for Christie's auction house says the 36 photos taken by Bert Stern sold for $146,500 on Tuesday. The pre-sale estimate was $100,000 to $150,000.
Christie's says the photos from a 1962 shoot were the last professional images taken of Monroe before she died that year of a drug overdose. They ran in Vogue instead as a memorial.
They're among more than 100 Monroe images being offered for sale at Christie's. The sale continues Wednesday.
Also at Christie's Tuesday, four Helmut Newton photographs, titled "They're Coming, Paris (Naked and Dressed)," sold for $662,500.
The buyers were anonymous.
The image by Bert Stern, one of the last pictures of Monroe before her death, could break the $63,000 mark set in 1994, according to the auction house.
Christie's also hopes to set a world auction record for a Helmut Newton work, the richest of which sold for $380,725 last year.
Both are part of the Constantiner Collection, which includes the largest-ever grouping of Monroe photos to come to market, more than 100 in all.
"She is an embodiment of the idea of glamour," said Philippe Garner, international director of photographs at Christie's.
The collection traces Monroe's progression from "a fresh-faced ambitious young girl who wanted to make it in Hollywood, to this more mature but in some ways troubled and confused woman who had the dilemma of trying to disentangle her identity from her audience's expectations," he told Reuters.
She was still a teenager named Norma Jeane Baker when she first posed for photographer Andre de Dienes, who was instrumental in launching Monroe into a modeling career and, eventually, stardom.
One of those early photo shoots resulted in a classic 1945 portrait of Monroe -- still a brunette then -- in front of a farm house, hay at her bare feet, smiling at someone behind the camera.
Leon and Michaela Constantiner began buying photos of glamour and style icons in the early 1990s. Their collection also includes works William Klein, Herb Ritts, Irving Penn, and scores of prints by Newton, including several life-size nudes estimated at up to $600,000.
Many of the images are already well-known. They appeared in mass market media and helped define the post-war period, Garner said. That contrasts with much contemporary photography, which is made for galleries and museums, rather than destined for magazines.
Since the turn of the millennium, digital photography has taken over from a chemical-based process, so prints available in the art market now are a part of history.
GLAMOUR ICON
Some of the famous faces whose images are up for sale: models Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista, singers Michael Hutchence and David Bowie, as well as actors Charlotte Rampling, Al Pacino, James Dean and Katharine Hepburn. Fidel Castro and Margaret Thatcher also appear.
But Monroe dominates.
An essential image in the collection, according to the auction house, is a 1957 Richard Avedon picture of Monroe in a sequined dress, when she momentarily drops her pose, looking reflective and a little sad. The print, made in 1980, is estimated to sell for $25,000 to $35,000.
Another key image is a 1949 color nude of Monroe by Tom Kelley, later used in the inaugural issue of Playboy magazine. It shows the young model, her arm raised, reclining against a bright red backdrop, and is estimated at up to $15,000.
One iconic series of photos came from a New York publicity shoot for the movie "The Seven Year Itch." It captured the same moments from a variety of angles as Monroe stood on a subway grate, the blast of air from a passing train supposedly causing her skirt to billow up, exposing her legs.
The truth about those shots?
"As far as I understand, there was an air hose (under that grate)," said senior specialist Stuart Alexander. "You got all the press there, you want to make sure you have a great show."
They are among more than 100 Monroe images being offered for sale in three sessions on Dec. 16-17 at Christie's auction house. They are expected to bring from $811,000 to $1.1 million.
The photographs represent a chronicle of Monroe's short life, from obscurity to Hollywood sex goddess. They capture her in all her manifestations — playful, sexy, innocent, insecure and anguished — as recorded by some of the biggest names in photography, including Tom Kelley, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, Gary Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt and Cornell Capa.
A set of four portraits from the Tobey Beach series, showing Monroe with long, curly tresses and her trademark winning smile, is estimated to sell for $7,000 to $9,000.
"She is one of the most iconic figures in the history of American culture of the past 100 years," said Josh Holdeman, head of Christie's 20th century art.
Among other highlights is a group of photos known as the "Last Sitting" and taken by Stern for Vogue in 1962, just weeks before Monroe's death at 36.
The eight-page feature was shot during three long sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air in Beverly Hills. As the issue was going to press, Vogue learned that the actress had died. An emergency meeting was called and it was decided that the photo layout should run just as planned — as a memorial tribute to Monroe.
Fifty-nine key images from the shoot — including an uncharacteristically forlorn-looking Monroe in a black dress that conceals her body — are estimated to bring $100,000 to $150,000.
A 1957 portrait of a crestfallen-looking Monroe in black halter dress — in which photographer Richard Avedon turned "the subject from a star into a mere mortal" — is estimated to fetch the sale's highest price for a single photo, up to $35,000, Christie's said.
Avedon "banished every trace of the erotic charm and effervescence for which the actress was celebrated. ... Behind the beautiful face, her spirits sag as gravely as the body beneath the sequined dress," the auction house said.
Christie's said the sale represents the largest collection of Monroe photos to come on the market. Many of the images were featured in the "I Wanna Be Loved By You" Monroe exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2004.
New York collectors Leon and Michaela Constantiner are selling the photos plus 250 other images representing fashion, glamour and celebrities by such art-world stars as Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethrope.
The collection also has an unusually large number of sexually explicit prints as well as nude photos of actors and models such as Kate Moss, Patti Hansen, Charlotte Rampling and Nastassja Kinski.
Buyers from around the world have expressed interest in the Constantiner collection, one of the largest of its kind, said Holdeman.
"For them to have embarked on a journey far before it became in the public eye critically important, it's incredibly prescient and ambitious," Holdeman said.
The photographers are being sued by Bert Stern, who owns rights to thousands of Monroe images. He shot the seven images in question in 1962 and lent them to Eros Magazine, according to a lawsuit filed last month in New York State Supreme Court.
The images were never returned, and Stern said he did not realize they were missing until he was approached by photographers Michael Weiss and Donald Penny, who had the pictures and wanted to license them.
"These photos were discarded more than 30 years ago and found in a pile of curbside garbage in the mid-1970s," said Jamie Brickell, an attorney for Weiss and Penny.
"Stern's claim that anything has been 'taken or stolen' from him is completely false," Brickell said in a statement.
The photos were shot in what became known as "the last sitting" because Monroe died six weeks later at age 36.
The lawsuit seeks return of the photographs plus $1 million and unspecified punitive damages for lost income.
The rare, 2.5-minute-long footage, which shows Monroe and co-star Tony Curtis on the set, was purchased by an anonymous Australian buyer during the Melbourne sale, auctioneer Charles Leski told Reuters.
"We're surprised there weren't more bidders, but we are happy that it sold," Leski, managing director of Leski Auctions, said. "It was a stab in the dark what price the footage would go for."
The footage was discovered in Australia last month and Leski had set a pre-sale estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 Australian dollars ($17,000-$25,500).
The 8mm film, which also shows director Billy Wilder, was taken in early 1959 by a U.S. naval officer who was invited to the set of the movie after Monroe visited his base in San Diego.
The film, in its original Kodak box, was passed on to his daughter who lives in Melbourne, Australia, when he died and she decided to put it up for sale.
The purchaser also acquires full commercial rights.
Earlier this year, a 47-minute amateur film of Monroe and Clark Gable on the set of the 1961 film "The Misfits" sold in the United States for $60,000 after it was put up for sale by the family of an actor who had a small part in the movie.
"Considering what Misfits reached in the U.S., we are happy, as this means we got A$7,000 per minute," Leski said.
The lot included a CD copy and DVD copy as well.
Leski had expected the footage, which unlike the film is in color, to generate a lot of interest, as "Some Like It Hot" is listed by the American Film Institute as the greatest American comedy film of all time.
Like other Monroe memorabilia, the footage had generated a lot of media interest since it was discovered.
Monroe died in August 1962, aged 36, from a drugs overdose.
($1=A$1.17)
Photographer Bert Stern, who owns the rights to thousands of Monroe images, shot the photographs in question in July 1962 at the Bel Air Hotel. He is demanding the prints from three people who obtained them.
Stern had sold the pictures to "Eros Magazine," but the images were never returned, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court.
Stern did not realize the images were missing until he was approached by three individuals who had obtained the photographs and wanted to license them, said his lawyer Stephen Weingrad.
Those individuals "offered to return the remaining prints demanding compensation or payment," the lawsuit said.
The defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.
The lawsuit demands the return of the photographs plus $1 million and unspecified punitive damages for lost income relating to the licensing of the images.
The shoot became known as "The Last Sitting" because six weeks later, in August 1962, the actress died of a drugs overdose at the age of 36. The photographs are among the most famous Monroe images ever recorded.
In February, Stern reprised the famous photo shoot for New York magazine with U.S. actress Lindsay Lohan, 21, posing as Monroe.
The pictures were so popular that the magazine's website crashed, receiving around 20 million daily page views on the first three days they were posted. The average daily page view during the previous month was 1.2 million.
Peter Ford, son of the actor who died in 2006 at the age of 90, said his father secretly commemorated the rendezvous on the eight-foot long plaid couch in his Beverly Hills home.
Glenn Ford marked the event by writing on the back of an oil painting that was dear to Monroe and hung near the sofa, Peter Ford said in a statement.
"When we made love she whispered, 'I wish I could die now, while I'm happy,"' Ford wrote on the back of the painting. The story first came to light when Peter Ford discovered the writing after his father's death.
Glenn Ford, whose career spanned more than five decades and is best-known for roles in Westerns like "3:10 to Yuma" and dramas like "The Big Heat," was a ladies man who entertained several Hollywood stars including Rita Hayworth and Judy Garland, his son said.
"Beneath that calm exterior was an incurable romantic with a love for life and an insatiable appetite for the ladies," Ford said. "Jimmy Stewart on the outside, perhaps, but he had the lust and libido of an Errol Flynn."
The auction on October 4-6 by Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, Texas, will also feature other personal items from Ford's estate.
Auctioneer Charles Leski said the 2.5-minute-long, 8mm film shows Monroe and co-star Tony Curtis on the set ahead of shooting a beach scene in which the actress is bouncing balls to get the actor's attention.
The footage, which also shows director Billy Wilder, was taken in early 1959 by a U.S. naval officer who was invited to the set of the movie after Monroe visited his base in San Diego.
The film, in its original Kodak box, was passed on to his daughter who lives in Melbourne, Australia, when he died and she decided to put it up sale, thinking it may be of some significance to the film world.
"It's been a significant part of the family folklore for many decades but it has been sitting in her drawer for about a decade as she didn't know what to do with it or if it had some broader interest," Leski told Reuters.
Earlier this year, a 47-minute amateur film of Monroe and Clark Gable on the set of the 1961 film "The Misfits" sold in the United States for US$60,000 after it was put up for sale by the family of an actor who had a small part in the movie.
Leski said this latest find was older and likely to attract private and public interest with "Some Like It Hot" listed by the American Film Institute as the greatest American comedy film of all time.
"It is color which is very nice because the film "Some Like It Hot" is black and white," he said.
"From a documentary point of view there is still great interest in any Marilyn Monroe image, moving or still, or any recording of her voice, as she has been such an iconic presence in the 20th century. Her influence on fashion, film and comedy and many other areas still continues."
Monroe died in August 1962, aged 36, from a drugs overdose.
The lot, including a CD copy and a DVD copy together with the original film, will be offered for sale by Leski Auctions in Melbourne on September 25 with a pre-sale estimate of A$20,000 - A$30,000 ($17,000-$25,500). The purchaser also acquires full commercial rights.
The two reels of silent, 8-millimeter color film shot on the set of "The Misfits" had been expected to draw starting bids of between $10,000 and $20,000.
The auction also included the original disco ball from "Saturday Night Fever" and an original script of "The Godfather" signed by Marlon Brando. The sale was held by Julien's Auctions at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.
The 47-minute film, "On the Set with 'The Misfits,'" was shot by film extra Stanley Floyd Kilarr. It features candid moments with Monroe and co-star Clark Gable, as well as Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter and director John Huston.
The film shows actors preparing for scenes, chatting with crew members and others on the set, and relaxing between takes.
"The Misfits" was the last completed film for both Monroe and Gable.
Gable had a fourth heart attack just after filming was finished and died Nov. 16, 1960, about two months before the movie's U.S. release. Monroe died Aug. 5, 1962.
Cathy and Rod McCormick, of Sparks, Nev., obtained the film canister from her father, Frank Hasy, Kilarr's uncle.
Items sold early Saturday included a suit worn by Elvis Presley in the film "Viva Las Vegas," which drew a bid of $36,325. Alfred Hitchcock's driver's license sold for $8,000, and an original "King Kong" French film poster sold for $40,625, according to the auction officials.
Anna Nicole Smith's former boyfriend Larry Birkhead attended the auction and spent nearly $3,000 on lingerie once worn by the late Playboy playmate. Birkhead said he was picking up mementos for the couple's 1-year-old daughter, Dannielynn.
The sale by Julien's Auctions in Las Vegas on Saturday features more than 400 memorabilia items ranging from actress Pamela Anderson's sports car to a piece of wedding cake from the marriage celebration of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
But the 47-minute film of Monroe and Gable preparing for scenes in 1961's "The Misfits" has drawn a lot of interest ahead of the sale and could bring $50,000 to $100,000, said Darren Julien, president and CEO of Julien's Auctions.
"That's become a focal point because it's behind-the-scenes and has never been seen before," Julien said.
Julien's obtained the film footage from the family of an actor who had a small part in the film.
Hollywood memorabilia has become increasingly popular with movie and television fans, especially aging baby boomers who have expendable income, because the items can trigger fond memories, Julien said.
"It's a way for them to buy back a memory from their childhood, it helps them relive those moments," Julien said.
Monroe's fans will find plenty to invest in. More than 125 lots relating to the actress -- including original photographs, hats and personal checks -- will be auctioned on Saturday.
A slice of royal wedding cake from the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana will be sold in its unopened box. Julien said Princess Diana presented one piece to each of her kindergarten students at the time, and his company obtained it from one of those pupils.
Actress Pamela Anderson's 2000 Dodge Viper RT/10 Roadster will also go up for auction. Anderson, 40, the former star of the TV show "Baywatch," will be in attendance as her sleek black sports car is sold, Julien said.
The auction will feature items from other Hollywood icons, including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando. There are some 250 lots of major studio photos and other images as well as paintings of animation art.
Video streaming from the auction will play live over the Internet on AuctionNetwork.com. The site allows viewers to join in bidding as if they themselves were there, which is a new advancement, Julien said.
Two reels of silent, eight-millimetre colour film titled "On Set With 'The Misfits"' is going on the auction block, with bids starting between $10,000 and $20,000. Julien's Auctions is listing the 47-minute film next month at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
According to the Julien's Auctions website, it's the original film by amateur photographer Stanley Floyd Kilarr, who shot scenes of the stars and crew during the making of "The Misfits" - the final completed film for both its stars, Monroe and Clark Gable.
Gable had a fourth heart attack just after filming was finished, and died Nov. 16, 1960, some two months before the movie's U.S. release. Monroe died Aug. 5, 1962.
Kilarr was part of the "Misfits" crew and shot his own film throughout production. "On Set With 'The Misfits"' features candid moments with Monroe and Gable, as well as Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter and director John Huston. The video shows the actors preparing for scenes, chatting with crew members and others on the set, and relaxing between takes.
"The two things that make it interesting are that very few people knew it even existed, and that the family was able to obtain a copyright," Julien's Auctions President Darren Julien told AP Television. That means the winning bidder will own the rights to license the footage for things like documentaries and special-edition DVDs.
The film is part of "Julien's Summer Entertainment Sale," which consists of more than 400 lots of Hollywood memorabilia. The auction is set to begin June 12, with bids accepted at Planet Hollywood and online.
Memorabilia collector Keya Morgan said he recently arranged the sale of the silent, black-and-white film from the son of a dead FBI informant who possessed it to a wealthy Manhattan businessman who wants to protect Monroe's privacy.
"The gentleman who bought it said out respect for Marilyn he's not going to make a joke of it and put it on the Internet and try to exploit her," said memorabilia collector Keya Morgan. "That's not his intention and I would never get my name involved if that were to happen."
Monroe is clothed and the man's head remains out of the frame for the entire 15 minutes of the film, said Morgan, who watched it.
Monroe was rumored to have had an affair with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and Morgan said then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a Kennedy rival, went to great lengths to try to prove it was Kennedy in the film.
One of Monroe's ex-husbands, the late baseball great Joe DiMaggio, once tried to buy it from the collector for $25,000 but "he would not part with it," according to FBI files on Monroe that are available on the FBI Web site.
Morgan is a well-known collector who owns memorabilia from the estates of Monroe and DiMaggio and said he was friends with Monroe's other two husbands, Jim Dougherty and Arthur Miller.
He said he learned of the existence of the film while working on a documentary about Monroe, who died in August 1962 at age 36. A former FBI agent told him about it, and Morgan said he confirmed it by tracking down the son of the FBI informant, who had provided a copy to the FBI.
"I thought the FBI agent was embellishing it for my documentary. I never believed it once until I pulled up the FBI document (referring to the film)," Morgan said.
The late informant's son had the original while the copy remains classified in the FBI files, said Morgan, whose deal was first reported by the New York Post on Monday.
"The FBI agent that I interviewed said J. Edgar Hoover was completely obsessed. A team of nine individuals were analyzing the tape inside a lab. J. Edgar Hoover brought in a few prostitutes who allegedly had been with President Kennedy and they tried to ... see if that was really President Kennedy."
An FBI spokesmen declined to comment except to point out the Monroe files available online, which refer to the film but make no mention of Hoover's purported interest.
So learned a Las Vegas man who alerted the media this week that he thought he had his hands on a rare photo of Marilyn Monroe posing nude as a hitchhiker. What he had was a famous photo of Madonna.
The image of the Material Girl, who often cast herself as a sort of latter-day Monroe, appeared in "Sex," her 1992 book of risque photography. In it, she posed in heels and handbag, with a cigarette in her mouth.
Lawrence Nicastro, 73, said he found the grainy, poster-size photo last year while going through storage items at his home in Las Vegas. He believed it had been left by a customer at his service station in the Bronx in 1962.
Nicastro and his wife, Phyllis, said they had spent about four months researching the origin of the photograph and called in Chris Harris, a publicist and Monroe expert, for help authenticating it.
Harris said it was a dead ringer for Monroe and scheduled a Wednesday news conference to unveil the image to reporters.
The two men gave The Associated Press a sneak peak Tuesday.
"You're right; it's Madonna," Harris said after being told of the mix-up. Harris said he believed someone had slipped the poster into Nicastro's storage as a prank.
"If there ever was an embarrassing moment," he said, adding that he planned to go ahead with the news conference to "face the music."
There is one person, he noted, who should feel good about the mistaken identity.
"Who wins here? Madonna, of course," Harris said. "She really looks like Marilyn Monroe."
A news conference is scheduled Wednesday.
Lawrence Nicastro says he found the photo last year while going through storage items at his Las Vegas home.
Nicastro was running a service station in New York's borough of the Bronx when a man dropped off a Ford Sunliner convertible for repairs on New Year's Eve 1962.
When the man didn't return to pick up his car, Nicastro opened the trunk and placed the contents in storage.
Nicastro's publicist believes the photo was taken near Pyramid Lake, near Reno, in 1960. Monroe filmed "The Misfits" with Clark Gable in 1960 in Nevada.
The actress died in 1962.
In a statement issued Tuesday by the estate's New York attorney, both sides in the dispute appear to be working on a resolution.
"Both parties are pleased with the progress of the discussions, which are directed to ensuring the continuing safety of this most valuable collection," Martin Pollner of Loeb & Loeb said.
Monroe's estate sued Millington Conroy on October 25, claiming he was illegally possessing letters, notes, financial records, recipes, jewelry, fur coats, hats, purses and perfume bottles belonging to the screen icon.
Conroy inherited the items from his mother, whose sister-in-law was Monroe's assistant, Inez Melson. For the year after Monroe's death, Melson was appointed by the court to administer and take inventory of the estate. But when she was discharged, rather than turning over everything to the estate, Melson kept several items, according to the lawsuit.
Monroe, who died in 1962, left nothing to Melson. All her personal effects and clothing were inherited by the late acting coach Lee Strasberg, whose estate is managed by his widow, Anna.
The lawsuit is the second against Conroy, who was ordered by the court in 1994 to turn over the Monroe property he had inherited. Conroy claimed some of that property was stolen from his car. The estate attempted to locate it at the time, but never could.
Recently, the estate learned that Conroy still had a large amount of Monroe's property, had allegedly allowed a photographer to take pictures of it for a book and may be planning to sell some of it at auction, according to the lawsuit.
With the items moved to a neutral location, Monroe's lost property may soon be on display.
"The Monroe Estate is actively exploring appropriate institutions for the preservation and display of this historic collection," Pollner said.
Web site Forbes.com (www.forbes.com) said on Tuesday that Elvis Presley regained the top spot on its list of the highest-earning dead celebrities, ousting Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain who had beaten him last year.
Elvis shimmied his way back atop the seventh annual list of 13 top-earning legends that he had ruled since its inception, with estimated earnings of about $49 million in the year ending this month.
The rise from $42 million last year comes after CKX Entertainment, which bought part of his estate from daughter Lisa Marie Presley, embarked on a mission to renew interest in the late singer and actor.
Forbes.com said in a statement that the top 13 -- who generated massive amounts of merchandising revenue -- grossed a combined $232 million in the year.
In second place came Beatle John Lennon, who was murdered in New York in 1980 at the age of 40. He earned $44 million while the creator of Peanuts comic strip, Charles M. Schulz, took the third slot with earnings of $35 million.
Cobain was one of four who fell off this year's ranking. He debuted on the list in first place last year after his widow, Courtney Love, sold part of his song catalog for a reported $50 million.
Rounding out the top five on this year's list were George Harrison from the Beatles, who died in 2001, with $22 million, and German-born physicist Albert Einstein with $18 million.
Einstein has become a key trademark in child education due to the Disney-owned Baby Einstein brand of videos and toys.
The Beatles did well in the latest list in the wake of settling two long-standing legal disputes with the settlements believed to have exceeded $100 million.
Newcomers in the list were actor Steve McQueen and the "Godfather of Soul" James Brown who died late last year. Rapper Tupac Shakur regained a slot on the list as did James Dean.
Rounding out the top 13 were pop artist Andy Warhol, Theodor Geisel, better known as children's author Dr. Seuss, silver screen legend Marilyn Monroe and reggae superstar Bob Marley.
The other three bumped off this year's list were rhythm & blues pioneer Ray Charles, author J.R.R. Tolkien and country singer Johnny Cash.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, marks the second case in a little more than a decade against Millington Conroy, who allegedly is in possession of letters, notes, financial records, recipes, jewelry, fur coats, hats, purses and perfume bottles that belonged to Monroe.
Conroy inherited the items from his mother, whose sister-in-law was Monroe's assistant Inez Melson. For the year after Monroe's death, Melson was appointed by the court to administer and take inventory of the estate. But when she was discharged, rather than turning everything over to the estate, Melson kept several items, according to the lawsuit.
Monroe left nothing to Melson. All her personal effects and clothing were inherited by acting coach Lee Strasberg, whose estate is managed by his widow, Anna.
In 1994, the Monroe estate learned of Conroy's plans to sell memorabilia and sued to stop the sale, claiming they were illegally owned. The courts agreed, ordering him to turn over whatever Monroe property he testified to owning.
But in September, the estate learned that Conroy still possessed some of Monroe's items. He allegedly allowed a photographer to take pictures of the items for a book, and the estate believes Conroy intends to sell them to collectors for millions.
The lawsuit seeks to enjoin Conroy from selling any of the items and to order him to turn over all Monroe property to the estate.
Conroy could not be reached for comment.
Well, maybe not always.
On Sunday, a Marilyn Monroe look-alike called the cops on a Chewbacca character, reports and Elmo say.
Officers took a battery complaint from a Monroe impersonator Sunday at the Hollywood & Highland complex, the outdoor Hollywood mall that serves as home base for the Oscars, LAPD officer April Harding said on Monday.
The woman, whose name police declined to reveal, alleged someone touched her on her right shoulder "without her permission," Harding said. She also told officers that about a month ago a man grabbed her hand and placed it on his genitals.
It was not known if one person was alleged to have perpetuated both incidents, Harding added.
The police report made no note of a certain Wookiee. There are no suspects, Harding said, and police aren't looking for any, either.
Reports and Donn Harper, aka Elmo, a Hollywood regular who, like his fellow street performers, dons a character suit and works the boulevard for tips from star-seeking tourists, said a Monroe implicated a Chewbacca in the Sunday incident.
Harper said he saw a Chewbacca being questioned by police on Sunday.
He believed Monroe became incensed at Chewbacca after some tourists told her she was the worst Marilyn Monroe they'd ever seen. "She went and accused Chewbacca of sending those people over there to say that," Harper said.
Harper, for one, was firmly in the Chewbacca's corner: He called the performer a "great guy"; he called the Monroe, in one of his more charitable comments, "a joke."
"She's even called the police on me a couple of times," Harper said.
The Hollywood Boulevard characters were in the news in February when one of their members—again, a Chewbacca—was arrested for allegedly head-butting a tour guide. Harding said it was not known if Sunday's incident and last winter's featured any of the same players, though according to Harper, it was the same Chewbacca.
Also, according to Harper, it was the same bum rap. "That was bulls--t," he said of the head-butting allegation.
All in all, Harper maintained, the boulevard gang gets along...with just a few exceptions.
Said Harper: "There's one or two rotten apples out there."
Monroe's estate sued Shaw Family Archives and Bradford Licensing Inc. in 2005 in Indiana alleging violations of the superstar's right of publicity by using her name, image and likeness for commercial purposes without consent. The suit was brought under Indiana's broad 1994 Right of Publicity Act, which recognizes a descendible postmortem right of publicity.
Shaw's family and several others then filed a declaratory relief action over the dispute in New York federal court.
The dispute arises out of the sale of T-shirts by Target featuring an image of Monroe that was taken by Shaw. The archive also owns a Web site that allows customers to license Monroe's image and likeness for various products.
Monroe's estate claimed its right of publicity was devised through the residuary clause in her will that included all property "to which (she) shall be in any way entitled."
The estate's Indiana case was eventually transferred to New York and consolidated with the Shaw case.
In her ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon found that at the time of her death in 1962, Monroe did not have any postmortem rights of publicity under the law of any relevant state, including California, where she died, and New York, which was purportedly her legal residence, though that is under dispute.
California began recognizing descendible publicity rights in 1984; New York limits its statutory publicity rights to living persons.
"As a result, any publicity rights she enjoyed during her lifetime were extinguished at her death by operation of law," McMahon wrote. "Nevertheless, (Marilyn Monroe Llc.) argues that her will should be construed as devising postmortem publicity rights that were later conferred on Ms. Monroe by statute. Such a construction is untenable."
And while there are disputes as to whether Monroe's home was in California or New York at the time of her death, "there is absolutely no doubt that she was not domiciled in Indiana," McMahon wrote.
The majority of Monroe's estate was left to legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who left it to his wife, Anna Strasberg, when he died in 1982. It is managed by Indiana-based CMG Worldwide, which oversees the marketing of other deceased celebrities.
"There is no question ... that at the time of Ms. Monroe's death in 1962, neither New York or California permitted a testator to dispose by will of property she did not own at the time of her death," McMahon concluded. "Any argument that the residuary clause of Ms. Monroe's will could devise a postmortem right of publicity is thus doubly doomed because the law in effect at the time of Ms. Monroe's death did not recognize descendible postmortem publicity rights and did not allow for distribution under a will of property not owned by the testator at the time of her death."
Additionally, McMahon said the Monroe estate's case is "doomed because both the California and Indiana postmortem right of publicity statutes recognize that an individual cannot pass by will a statutory property right that she did not possess at the time of her death."
Rare photos of Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and other stars of the film "The Misfits" are featured in the exhibit "Inge Morath: road to reno," on view through July 15 at the Nevada Museum of Art.
Morath also photographed the man she later married — playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote "The Misfits" and was in the final stages of his marriage to Monroe at the time.
About 70 photos on display — mostly black and whites — record Morath's 18-day road trip to Reno from New York City and her time on the set for the photography agency Magnum Photos, which was hired to document the shooting of the offbeat movie about a group of Nevada loners.
"The Misfits," filmed almost exclusively around Reno from July to November 1960, was the only movie Monroe and Gable appeared in together, and was the last completed film for both.
"(Morath) is not interested in simply capturing the star power and the legends," said Ann Wolfe, the museum's curator. "She was looking for a greater truth behind the surface. It was a bittersweet melancholy encapsulated in some of her photos."
The Austrian-born photographer's Reno assignment was among the highlights of a prolific career that spanned more than 50 years, said John Jacob, director of The Inge Morath Foundation based in New York City. Morath, who won international awards, was involved as a photographer, writer or both in the publication of more than two dozen books. Her interests ranged from celebrities to the Soviet Union.
The charming, witty Morath had a knack for capturing the essence of her subjects, Jacob said.
"Most people put up a wall when they have their picture taken," he said. "She seemed to be able to allow people to let down their guard. Her time in Reno has to be one of the highlights of her career because that's where she met her husband. They certainly became friendly then, but not involved then."
One of Morath's more captivating photos shows Monroe and Miller alone in their suite at Reno's Mapes Hotel after a day's shooting. Miller, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, gazes at Monroe as she peers out a window, her back to him.
Monroe and Miller took separate rooms during the filming, and divorced in 1961. A year later, Morath became Miller's third wife and remained married to him until her death in 2002 at age 77. Miller, who wrote the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning play "Death of a Salesman," died in 2005 at age 89.
"I think there's a real melancholic sense in that photo. I think she was able to capture (the Monroe-Miller) relationship. ... A very ephemeral moment," Wolfe said. "It's quite fascinating that Morath is documenting this relationship and only two years later finds herself married to him."
Also revealing are a portrait of a smiling Monroe in a bathrobe and a color photo of her in a black dress and high heels preparing for a sidewalk scene near a group of gawking bystanders.
"(The latter photo) captures her in an in-between state. She's focused on her job, but forced to reckon with her stardom and fishbowl existence. She seems to be caught in the headlights," Wolfe said.
"The portrait of Monroe in the bathrobe is not as simple as it appears. If you look closely, you can see this distant gaze — kind of an emptiness."
Among other photos, Gable is shown leaning over next to Monroe as she sits in bed with only a sheet draped over her. Another captures Gable relaxing with director John Huston during a break in shooting.
The photos reflect little of the tension that plagued the set, and for good reason: Morath worked during the early weeks of the filming before major problems surfaced, Jacob said.
She was among nine Magnum photographers assigned to record the filming, and her colleagues captured more of the tension later, Jacob said.
Monroe's frequent tardiness, blamed on pill-popping, caused annoying delays for her co-stars and Huston. Late-night drinking and gambling by others also caused problems. Twelve days after the movie wrapped, Gable died of a heart attack at age 59. Less than 21 months later, Monroe died at age 36 of a drug overdose that was ruled a suicide.
Though she enjoyed hearing a "wonderful" Gable tell stories about his movies, Morath seemed intrigued more by Monroe. She found the screen idol to be "marvelous to look at" but very insecure.
"Actually, Marilyn was fascinating to watch. The way she moved, her expressions; she was just extraordinary," Morath wrote in the book "The Road to Reno."
"There was such strength and energy combined with this fragility. What I wanted to do was the unposed person. ... You might see in some of the close-ups, behind the smile there was a tragic undertone."
Morath had a great talent for drawing people in, even without a camera, according to Miller.
"Her pictures of Marilyn are particularly empathic and touching as she caught Marilyn's anguish beneath her celebrity, the pain as well as her joy in life," Miller wrote.
Lennon's black cowboy hat is expected to fetch between $15,200 to $19,000, Bonhams auction house said Tuesday. Lennon wore it during an August 1969 photo shoot that followed the Beatles' final recording session.
The cream pantaloons that Monroe wore in the 1954 Western movie "River of No Return" are estimated to sell for between $3,800 to $5,700 at the Nov. 22 sale.
A handful of rare publicity posters for 2002's "Spider-Man" film will also be on the auction block. The posters, printed before Sept. 11, 2001, and recalled after the terror attacks, show the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center reflected in Spider-Man's eyes.
The auction will also include movie posters from early 20th-century hits such as "All Quiet on the Western Front" and concept sketches for the 1960s TV show "Thunderbirds."
"We are delighted to be selling such an important collection of TV memorabilia," Stephanie Connell, of Bonhams' rock and roll and film department, said Tuesday. "Rarely can one have an insight into the concepts of such an iconic series."
Derek Meddings, special effects supervisor for "Thunderbirds," also worked on the "Captain Scarlet," "Batman" and "Superman" shows. The sale includes his original drawings of the Batplane from the first of Tim Burton's "Batman" films and the designs of the Cox Gun used in the 1977 James Bond movie, "The Spy Who Loved Me."
Breaking his silence for the first time to Page Six, Raphael says that in 1956, his bosses urged Presley to ask out the blond bombshell as a publicity stunt, but when he approached her on a studio lot, Monroe nixed the idea. "He was very embarrassed, but I think she turned him down because she felt it was too public," Rapahel says. "But Presley didn't give up and secretly set up a meeting.
"Two weeks later, Elvis called me and said, 'I want you to pick up Marilyn.' She lived in an apartment with Shelley Winters and I don't think she wanted Shelley to know where she was going.
"It was a rainy night and I brought her to the Beverly Wilshire [hotel] and we went upstairs to his room," Raphael relates. "When he saw her, they came together and, without saying a word, started kissing. I was in shock and I didn't know what to do. Then Marilyn, who was 10 years older, said, 'You're pretty good for a guitar player.'
"After two minutes, they went into the bedroom and I didn't know if I was supposed to leave, or stay and wait for them, so I sort of just dozed off. The next thing I knew I was startled awake by the door opening and I dove behind the bar. And they both walked out stark naked. I didn't say a word. I just stayed quietly."
When Monroe and Presley went back into the bedroom, Raphael bolted. "He either put her in a cab or she stayed the night, I don't know," the agent recalls. "A few days later, when I mentioned Marilyn to Elvis, he said, 'She's a nice gal, but a little tall for me.'
"I knew that this was the sort of thing that could ruin their careers. They were two of the most famous people in the world and Marilyn was still married to Arthur Miller at the time - so I never said a word."
The Hollywood dealmaker concludes, "There were a lot of other young girls I would bring up to see Elvis - but he would never mention Marilyn again."
In this very watchable but sometimes overly self-important installment of PBS' "American Masters," she gets full-blown, culturally urgent treatment as an American icon. But to say that she is or was an American Master is iffy at best. Still, as these documentaries go, the subject, in this case Monroe, gets crucially (and masterfully) important because those who discuss her deem her so. That's how it goes with being or becoming an icon: You're one because those who do the public talking decide that you are.
The 60-minute documentary directed by Gail Levin summons many (so many) photos from those who took pictures of Monroe. These are coupled with some onscreen interviews with Hugh Hefner, Arnold Newman, Phil Stern and others who knew the actress, and they add much data to the already fully packed cultural archive that exists on Monroe. But the most fascinating aspect of this look at the woman who would now be 80 years old is the notion of how fragile, and agile, public discussion can be. A documentary like this can make Marilyn Monroe stand in the same space as, say, a Richard Rodgers, a Walt Whitman, even a Sam Clemens. Is this possible? Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't.
Presley, who died in 1977, raked in an estimated $52 million last year. Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994, generated about $50 million. Most of that came when his widow, Courtney Love, sold 25 percent of Nirvana's song catalog in April.
Einstein, who has been dead for more than 50 years, took in about $20 million in 2005, Forbes estimates. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem controls the famed thinker's estate and collects $5 million a year from the use of his images. The university also earns royalties from Disney's line of Baby Einstein toys and videos, Forbes reports, which generated $400 million in sales last year.
Warhol died in 1987. Still, he earned $16 million last year through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which owns his estate. Monroe, who died in 1962, generated $8 million in 2005.
Biographer Anthony Summers, who has examined hundreds of pages of unreleased federal documents, says the blond bombshell met with her occasional bedmate President John F. Kennedy less than a month before her death of a drug overdose in 1962 - and one subject discussed over lunch was "nuclear testing." The lunch was three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since the nuclear issue was the hot potato of the day, and Monroe was known to have acquaintances in the Communist Party, the meeting was reported to high officials.
Other nuggets uncovered by Summers, who's updating his best-selling 1985 bio, "Goddess," include the discovery that Monroe had a previously unrevealed romantic involvement in her last months with a married man from another famous American dynasty. Her other past lovers included JFK's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a wealthy Communist, and a man "who appeared to be a left-winger but was apparently being manipulated by U.S. intelligence," Summers says.
While not supporting the conspiracy theory that Monroe was murdered, Summers' new material strengthens the evidence that the true circumstances of her mysterious death were covered up. Indications are that Robert Kennedy was in L.A. on Monroe's last day alive and that he ordered up a helicopter to fly out of town shortly before the star's death was reported to the police.
Summers also discovered an admission by a federal agent that he was ordered to remove the record of Monroe's last phone calls before it could become part of the police file. Other testimony indicates she was not found dead in bed at home - the scenario given to the public - but may have died at a mob-run lodge and casino miles from Los Angeles.
While every inch of Monroe's triumphant and tragic life have been investigated and written about ad nauseam for years, there's no doubt the public remains endlessly fascinated by her. The world marked what would have been her 80th birthday on Thursday, when an artist's rendition of what she would have looked like today was released.
The exhibit aboard the Queen Mary, which is moored in Long Beach, features items including hair rollers, suitcases, a lipstick holder and a "red shiny dress" that the iconic sex symbol supposedly owned. Thousands of people have paid $22.95 each to see it since it opened in November.
The lawsuit filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, however, claims that Monroe had nothing to do with many of them and that some were made after she died from an overdose of sleeping pills in August 1962.
A spokeswoman for the Queen Mary and the exhibit declined to comment Tuesday to the Los Angeles Times, and the paper said it was unable to reach the items' owner, Chicago collector Robert W. Otto. He has previously insisted the items are authentic.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two people who attended the exhibit — Ernest Cunningham, author of "The Ultimate Marilyn," and Emily Sadjady. It asks that the Queen Mary and exhibit organizers be forced to refund admission fees and also seeks unspecified punitive damages.
"The Queen Mary should have done a little more homework," said the plaintiffs' attorney, George Braunstein.
The exhibit opened on the ship after the Hollywood Museum canceled a scheduled show over questions about the authenticity of some of the memorabilia.
Carroll spent three decades travelling the world for news organizations like Maclean’s, Weekend Magazine, Colliers and Sports Illustrated. He died in 1995 at age 76.
During a long career, he put together a personal archive of more than 21,000 photographs, among them a famous collection of Marilyn Monroe photos.
His son Angus Carroll, now living in Ohio, has agreed to pass the collection on to the National Archives, says Sarah Stacey, the archivist in charge of organizing the collection.
"When he learned that we collect Canadian documentary photography of national significance, he was so pleased to have the collection come to us. He said 'This belongs in Canada and I’ll send it up,'" she said in an interview with CBC Radio.
The collection includes photos, correspondence and audio and video from Carroll’s varied career.
There are photos of Marilyn Bell swimming Lake Ontario, a young Robert Goulet appearing on the Wayne and Shuster Show, athletes such as Maurice Richard, Canadian artists such as A.Y. Jackson and Harold Towne and Hollywood celebrities such as Gloria Swanson and Dean Martin.
"It’s a colourful, very diverse collection that kind of captures the working life of a photojournalist who had a lot of interesting assignments," Stacey said.
Born in Toronto in 1919, Carroll was a war correspondent and RCAF pilot. He worked for the Toronto Telegram after the war and his 1971 book, The Death of the Toronto Telegram, documents many anecdotes from newspaper life in the 1940s and 1950s.
Although Carroll was a writer, it is as a photographer he is best remembered, Stacey said.
In 1952, he was assigned to photograph Monroe on the set of Niagara for Weekend Magazine. He had three days to shoot the screen goddess, and the very candid collection was gathered in 1996 in Falling for Marilyn: The Lost Niagara Collection.
"Carroll was successful with connecting with celebrities," Stacey said. "The files are interesting because he spent longer with celebrities than people do today. He spent three days with Marilyn Monroe and would knock on her door when she was still in bed. He’s got pictures of her there getting ready for the day."
There are no plans yet to display the material, but anyone can gain access to photos and other records in the National Archives and the collection will be made available for researchers, she said.
Carroll spent time in Korea in 1951 and his shots of Canadian soldiers in the trenches are a rare record of the Korean war experience, she said.
Carroll also photographed the 23-year-old Glenn Gould, flying to the Bahamas for three days with the piano prodigy.
"Carroll was a Hank Williams kind of guy," Stacey said, but he came away from the shoot with an appreciation of classical music. Those photos were gathered in a 1994 collection called Glenn Gould: Some Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man.
The award followed a summary judgment in favor of the publisher, VNU Business Media Inc. The company was sued for using seven Monroe photographs in the 2001 biography "Blonde Heat."
A court found that the photos — from the movies "Bus Stop" and "The Prince and the Showgirl" — were in the public domain, the publisher's attorney, Andrew J. Thomas, said Monday.
The summary judgment has been appealed.
Surjit Soni, the attorney who represented Milton H. Greene Archives Inc., said the award also would be appealed. The company was named for the photographer who took the photos.
Cartoonist Charles Schulz (2000) is next on the list with $35 million, followed by musician John Lennon (1980), who raked in $22 million.
Artist Andy Warhol's (1987) take was $16 million, "Cat in the Hat" author Dr. Seuss (1991) made $10 million, followed by actor Marlon Brando (2004) with $9 million.
Actress Marilyn Monroe (1962) and "Lord of the Rings" author J.R.R. Tolkien (1973) are tied with $8 million apiece. George Harrison (2001), Johnny Cash (2003), and Irving Berlin (1989) finished in a three-way tie, with each musician bringing in $7 million.
The watch was sold with a poem titled: "A heartfelt plea on your birthday," typed in black on a paper disk placed at the bottom of the gold case containing the watch. The two are rumored to have had an affair about that time.
The poem read:
"Let lovers breathe their sighs
And roses bloom and music sound
Let passion burn on lips and eyes
And pleasures merry world go round
Let golden sunshine flood the sky
AND LET ME LOVE
OR LET ME DIE!"
Bill Panagopulos, founder of Connecticut-based auctioneer Alexander Autographs, said on Monday an American collector outbid a European for the watch and case.
The gift was dated about the same time as Monroe's seductive cooing of "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to Kennedy at his 1962 Madison Square Garden party in New York. A beaded dress she wore at that occasion sold for $1,267,500 in 1999.
Panagopulos said the watch was kept secret for decades. He said documentation showed it was handed down through the family of Kennedy's late presidential aide, Kenneth O'Donnell, and the former president appeared uncomfortable with the gift.
A letter sold with the watch at Saturday's auction, titled "The Unwanted Gift," said: "This watch was given to my late father in 1962 by President Kennedy in person with the instruction 'get rid of it'."
Monroe died of an overdose of barbiturates on August 5, 1962.
Dougherty died Monday in San Rafael, Calif., of complications of leukemia, his stepdaughter, Annie Woods of Sabattus, told the Sun-Journal of Lewiston. He had spent much of his later years in Maine.
Dougherty married Baker in 1942, before he went to sea as a merchant mariner. She was 16 at the time.
Baker set out to pursue a Hollywood career while Dougherty was gone, and the two were divorced in 1946. Dougherty remarried twice.
Dougherty worked for the Los Angeles police department for 25 years, serving as a detective and training the department's first Special Weapons and Tactics group. After his retirement in 1974, he moved to Arizona and later to Maine, living in the small town of Sabattus.
Dougherty refused for years to talk about his time with Monroe, but after his second divorce he was more comfortable with the subject. In 1997, Dougherty wrote a book titled To Norma Jeane with Love, Jimmie.
He said he followed Marilyn's career until her death in 1962. She was a movie star, while the woman he married was a small-town girl, he said.
"I love her, but I'm not in love with her," he told the Sun-Journal in a 1997 interview. "There's a lot of difference between loving someone and being in love."
In 1995, he showed up at the Skowhegan post office for a party celebrating a new stamp bearing Monroe's picture. He autographed books of stamps as his current wife looked on from a nearby seat.
"It seemed like a nice, positive program, so I said I'd come out," he said. He recalled that 16-year-old bride's "plans then were to be a homemaker."
While living in Maine, he served a stint as an Androscoggin County commissioner and taught at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy.
"His years with Marilyn Monroe, that was just a small part of his life," said Schani Krug, who wrote, produced and directed a documentary titled Marilyn's Man about Dougherty last year. "He was everything she never had."
His third wife, Rita, died in 2003. Dougherty's family plans to fly his body back to Maine for burial, Woods said.
"There was no possible way this woman could have killed herself," John Miner told the Los Angeles Times for a story published Friday. "She had very specific plans for her future. She knew exactly what she wanted to do."
Miner, 86, said he would like to see another autopsy performed on Monroe and believes the large dose of barbiturates found in her body may have been administered by someone else.
Meanwhile, fans were holding their annual gathering Friday near her crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park to honour the star of movies such as Some Like It Hot.
Conspiracy theories about Monroe's Aug. 5, 1962, death have become part of her legend. Many continue to doubt the official conclusion of "probable suicide" reached after the 36-year-old actress was found naked and face down on a bed in her Brentwood home.
Miner is the former head of the Los Angeles County district attorney's medical-legal section. He provided the Times with notes he says he took of audiotapes made by Monroe's psychiatrist.
Miner said they show a motivated actress who wanted to do Shakespearean plays and promised her psychiatrist that she had thrown all her "pills in the toilet," a possible reference to her reported drug dependency.
The notes, which Miner called "extensive" and "nearly verbatim," also show Monroe obsessing about the Oscars, alleging she had a one-night stand with Joan Crawford and speaking candidly about the failures of her marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.
There has been no independent confirmation of the tapes, which Miner said he believes may have been made close to the time of Monroe's death. Miner said the psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, played the tapes for him in 1962 on condition that he never reveal their contents, and that Greenson may have destroyed them before his 1979 death.
Miner said years after Greenson's death, he broke the promise after some biographers suggested that Greenson might be considered a suspect in Monroe's death.
Greenson's widow, Hildegard, told the Times that she did not know whether the tapes existed and never heard her husband discuss them.
According to Miner's notes, Monroe praised President John F. Kennedy but never indicates she slept with him. She does mention his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, saying "there is no room in my life for him."
"I want someone else to tell him it's over," she says, according to Miner's notes.
Miner has shown his notes to several people in recent years and excerpts appeared in Matthew Smith's book Marilyn's Last Words: Her Secret Tapes and Mysterious Death.
However, the Times received previously unpublished parts from Miner.
The district attorney's office re-examined Monroe's death in 1982 and interviewed Miner but determined there wasn't enough evidence to open a criminal investigation.
At the time, Miner mentioned that Greenson had the taped interviews but never said he had notes of them, said Ronald Carroll, a former deputy district attorney who conducted the review.
If Miner had mentioned the notes, Carroll said he probably would have sought them through a grand jury subpoena.
The actress died in August 1962.
The auction will be conducted by Julien's Auctions of Los Angeles/New York at Barclay Butera in Los Angeles on June 4. The items will be on display May 31-June 3.
Items in the auction also include her 1956 application to a New York City court to change her name from Norma Jean Mortenson to Marilyn Monroe and a pearl grey silk dress she wore in the 1960 film Let's Make Love.
"This is the first time that most of these items will be seen by the public, including a dizzying array of clothing from all the designers she cherished," Darren Julien, president and CEO of Julien's Auctions, said in a recent statement.
"Her personal telephone directory contains hundreds of names and numbers of top Hollywood celebrities including Frank Sinatra, Henry Fonda, Jane Russell and even former husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller," Julien said.
Monroe, who died at 36 of a drug overdose, was married to DiMaggio for 21 months; they were divorced in 1955. She had earlier been married to James Dougherty, and later to playwright Arthur Miller.
The jewelry of another Hollywood star, Ann Miller, also will be sold June 4.
The renowned writer died of heart failure on Thursday night, Feb. 10 at his home in Roxbury, Conn., with his family at his side, reports the AP.
Miller found success when he was just 33 for winning the Pulitzer for "Salesman" in 1949. The play about Willy Loman and his self-destructive beliefs have struck a chord with people and has been produced for the stage and screen worldwide.
The playwright was also married to Marilyn Monroe, which further brought him into the public eye. Although Miller once called her "highly self-destructive," he also felt that the public's view of her as a sex symbol added to her problems.
"To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was," he wrote in his 1987 autobiography, "Timebends: A Life." "Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes."
Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York on October 17, 1915, one of three children. He put himself through college at the University of Michigan by working as a loader and shipping clerk in a warehouse. He began writing plays in college and also worked on novels and short stories.
Following his success with "Salesman," Miller wrote the highly acclaimed play "The Crucible" in 1953 as a commentary on the Communist witch hunting taking place at the time that affected him personally. When he refused to give the names of members of a literary circle that was suspected of Communist affiliations, he was found guilty of contempt, which was later reversed in August 1958.
Miller later received an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of "Crucible" for the 1996 film version starring Daniel Day-Lewis, who is married to Miller's daughter, writer Rebecca Miller.
While waiting for residency to divorce his first wife, Mary Slattery, in Reno, Nevada, Miller met a group of cowboys who inspired the short story "The Misfits." He later adapted the story for the big screen, starring second wife Monroe. It was on the set of "Misfits" that Miller met photographer Inge Morath, who would become his third wife.
Miller and Monroe divorced after five years of marriage. In 1962, after he married Morath, Monroe committed suicide. His 1963 play "After the Fall" reflects on the troubled starlet.
Miller's other plays include "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan," which he staged in London, "Broken Glass" in 1994, "Resurrection Blues" in 2002 and 2004's "Finishing the Picture."
Over the years, Miller has earned numerous Olivier and Tony awards for his works. When he was 83, he received a lifetime achievement award, for which he joked, "Just being around to receive it is a pleasure."
Miller is survived by his children: Jane Ellen and Robert by his first wife and daughter Rebecca, by Morath.
The actress turned enduring American icon was intoxicated by the pop of flashbulbs; during her too-short lifetime, she was photographed drinking and dining, smiling and sleeping, dressed and undressed.
The camera "was to her what water is to a fish," director Billy Wilder once said. "She exulted in it."
More than 200 Monroe pictures from 39 photographers — including such celebrated lensmen as Richard Avedon, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank and Andy Warhol — are on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in a new exhibit, "I Want to Be Loved by You: Photographs of Marilyn Monroe."
The photos "are timeless," said Marilyn Kushner, one of the exhibit's curators. "She died young, so she remains forever young. As time goes by, she looms larger and larger."
The exhibit traces the evolution of small-town girl Norma Jeane into sex goddess Marilyn. In a 1945 picture, the unknown 19-year-old stands alone on a Long Island beach, leaning undisturbed over an open parasol.
A decade later, a coy Monroe stands smiling on a Grand Central subway platform as a man to her left stares in bug-eyed disbelief.
The centerpiece of the collection, owned by Leon and Michaela Constantiner, is a set of 59 Monroe pictures shot by photographer Bert Stern in the weeks before the actress' 1962 drug overdose. "The Last Sitting" features an assortment of behind-the-scenes shots of Monroe, who sipped nine-year-old Dom Perignon to create a mood. The actress posed laughing, with a diamond necklace draped across her bare shoulders, and topless behind a transparent scarf.
More than four decades later, her larger-than-life persona still emanates from each shot, setting the bar for subsequent "blonde bombshells," from Loni Anderson to Madonna to Pamela Anderson.
"Her relationship with the camera was the most important one she had," Kushner said of Monroe. "She saw the camera as a friend."
The most enduring image of Monroe, her infamous photo op for "The Seven Year Itch," is well represented. There are 14 different shots of Monroe's white dress scandalously billowing above her waist as she stood over a Lexington Avenue subway grate.
An infuriated DiMaggio stormed off during the shoot, leaving Monroe alone. Another picture from the exhibit shows a sobbing Monroe leaving in a car after announcing her 1954 divorce from the Yankee Clipper.
Monroe's Playboy centerfold, shot by photographer Tom Kelly, holds a prominent position in the exhibit, with the naked actress seductively posed atop a blanket of red velvet. When a reporter asked Monroe what she had on during the shoot, she memorably replied, "I had the radio on."
There are dozens of other shots offering glances into the off-screen Monroe: Marilyn reading a book at home, shooting craps with director John Huston, slow-dancing with second husband Arthur Miller.
While photographs make up the bulk of the exhibit, the multimedia presentation offers other rarely seen glimpses of Monroe, from a 1950 commercial for Union Oil of California to her provocative serenade of President John F. Kennedy at his 45th birthday in May 1962.
"I can now retire from politics after having had `Happy Birthday' sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way," Kennedy deadpanned. Within 18 months, neither he nor Monroe would be alive.
One of the most moving pictures doesn't feature Monroe at all. Shot by Robert Frank in 1962, it shows a woman lying on a beach beneath an American flag. She's reading the Daily News, and the giant-type headline is clearly visible:
"MARILYN DEAD."