Today is the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, one of the biggest American figures to ever surface during the 20th century, whose visage and image was, is, and remains one of the most recognizable of all time, and not only one that comes from the likes of Tinseltown, but also from an iconic standpoint as well, the flashy, dazzling, misunderstood, bubbly, first as an ingénue, then as a flashbulb popping chartreuse star, and finally, a tragic figure.
It would be unthinkable to imagine the whole scope and spectrum of Hollywood’s surreal realism of its fan based historic imagery and not have Marilyn Monroe right at the forefront. Exuding a kind of ditzy, effervescent charm in everything she did on camera and in the way her star navigated itself through the Hollywood constellations, Monroe was at once forceful, tender, strong, vulnerable, leered at, and eventually almost shunned. Starting out as a troubled youth in her real guise as one Norma Jeane Baker, and somehow having the good fortune and hard work to transform herself into a voluptuous blonde by way of peroxide and oozing sexuality, Monroe became an almost sensual mythical figure to the many adoring fans who positively swooned over her in her heyday, and then after her untimely death at the tender age of 36 from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, and up to now, became a larger than existence figurehead which was able to spread her image far and wide, becoming a symbol of iconic proportions, and came to represent the female Hollywood starlet as something raised to the highest art.
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