CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/9/2026

A centennial celebration of Marilyn Monroe, in all her complexity

Featured photograph—made by Milton H. Greene in 1955—is from new release Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, published to accompany the centennial exhibition on view now at National Portrait Gallery, London. Collecting 225 reproductions and essays by a host of contemporary writers, this book goes beyond the triumph and the tragedy to the “tilted fairytale” of the universal. “Marilyn has something for everyone,” Lena Dunham writes. “If you feel you are caged by male perceptions of your beauty, she is a cautionary tale. And yet if you feel your body is too big, too wild, or too different, she let the curves that spoke louder than she could show through clingy fabrics. If you feel you are not taken seriously by the powers that be, Marilyn is someone who never became the actress, poet or painter she was in her private time. And if you want to prove that a sex kitten can powerfully shift the culture, there she is, singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president who happened to be her erstwhile lover. … She is everywhere. And despite being everywhere, with something for everyone, she had something just for me. Her story was a tilted fairytale I could wear like a locket, believing—as so many have believed—that the ways in which I saw her were different.”