Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on this day in Los Angeles, Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) lived with her single mother, Gladys, for only 12 days, then spent most of her lonely childhood in different foster homes.

"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 launched a modeling career in 1944. Two years later, the beauty 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 hit it big 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; sexy, but vulnerable. A postwar sex symbol, her personal life was complex. She studied literature at UCLA and was a fan of 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 told a reporter.

Biographer Joyce Carol Oates agreed: "Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was 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, but in 1999, a Christie’s auction of her belongings raised $13.4 million.

Her book collection alone raised $475,000, benefiting Literacy Partners, an organization that teaches New Yorkers 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.”