Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on this day in Los Angeles, Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) entered the world with very little steadiness around her. She lived with her mother, Gladys, for only twelve days, then spent much of her childhood moving through foster homes and temporary places that never quite felt like home.

“My mother… was a pretty woman who never smiled,” Monroe once recalled. “I'd seen her often before but I hadn't known quite who she was. When I said, ‘Hello mama,’ she stared at me. She had never kissed me or held me in her arms or hardly spoken to me.”

After an unsuccessful marriage, she began modeling in 1944. Two years later, she signed with 20th Century-Fox for $125 a week, using her mother's family name, Monroe.

“I'm going to be a great movie star some day,” she said. She appeared in All About Eve (1950), then rose quickly with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry A Millionaire in 1953. “I am not interested in money,” she explained. “I just want to be wonderful.”

On screen, she was wonderful: alluring yet innocent, luminous yet vulnerable. The world shaped her into a symbol, but her private life was more layered and thoughtful than the image allowed. She studied literature at UCLA and loved music, especially Beethoven and Mozart.

She married baseball superstar Joe DiMaggio in 1954, divorcing nine months later. Her 1956 marriage to playwright Arthur Miller lasted five years. “Miller wouldn't have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde,” she once said.

Biographer Joyce Carol Oates agreed: “Her problem wasn't that she was a dumb blonde. It was that she wasn't a blonde and wasn't dumb.”

Monroe longed to be taken seriously as an actress and formed her own production company in 1955. At her death, she had only $2,200 in her account. Yet in 1999, a Christie’s auction of her belongings raised $13.4 million, a reminder of how deeply her presence continued to resonate.

Her book collection alone raised $475,000, benefiting Literacy Partners, an organization devoted to teaching adults to read and write.

Even in death, she remains center stage. Celebrity photographer John Kobal explained her enduring image: “She stood for life. She radiated life. In her smile, hope was always present. She glorified life, and her death did not mar this final image. She had become a legend in her own time, and in her death, took her place among the myths of our century.”