For decades, Marilyn Monroe has been flattened into an image. But bfi is helping push back against that reduction with a centenary season that treats her as a performer, a strategist, and a creative force. The timing matters: as her image is endlessly recycled, two major British exhibitions are asking audiences to look again at the work behind the legend. One revisits her films. The other examines how her persona was made. Together, they suggest Monroe’s legacy is not just cultural memory, but active debate.
Why this matters now for bfi and Monroe’s legacy
The BFI season, titled Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star, opens on 1 June and runs to the end of July. It brings Monroe back into focus through three strands: Star Attractions, Dramatic Turns, and Scene Stealers. That structure is more than programming language. It is an argument that Monroe’s career cannot be reduced to glamour or tragedy alone. The season also includes a re-release of The Misfits in cinemas across the UK and Ireland, placing her final completed film at the center of the centenary conversation.
What makes the effort notable is its refusal to treat Monroe as a finished cultural object. Kimberley Sheehan, the BFI’s lead programmer, described her as “the original triple threat” and said she deserves credit for crafting her own image and stardom. That view is echoed by the BFI’s broader invitation to audiences: revisit the films, not just the myth. In an era when Monroe’s likeness is widely commodified, that distinction has become central to how her work is understood.
The films behind the image
Monroe’s screen career, as framed by bfi, runs from Ladies of the Chorus in 1948 to Something’s Got To Give in 1962. The span matters because it shows movement: from early visibility to a more complex dramatic presence. The BFI says she worked with major directors and onscreen talent while shifting between effervescent comedy and increasingly serious roles.
The season’s curation points viewers toward that range. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire are presented not simply as star vehicles, but as evidence of a “dynamite presence. ” The Misfits offers a different register: heartbreak, fragility, and the sense of a performer working at full intensity in a role that leaves little room for caricature. Even smaller appearances in Clash by Night and All About Eve are being positioned as proof of nuance rather than nostalgia.
That framing is important because Monroe’s reputation has often been built from fragments. A famous pose, a scandal, a final image. The bfi season tries to reconnect those fragments to the work itself. It also underscores a historical claim made in the BFI’s own description of her career: she was the first woman since the silent era to set up her own production company, and she protested poor-quality scripts. Those details shift the story from passive stardom to creative control.
Portraiture, performance, and control
The parallel exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery deepens that argument from another angle. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait runs from June to September and brings together work by artists and photographers including Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty and Richard Avedon. It is designed to show not only how Monroe was pictured, but how she helped shape the picture.
That emphasis on agency is reinforced by the inclusion of previously unseen portraits taken by Allan Grant at her Brentwood home just a day before her death in August 1962. The session produced 432 images, only eight of which were originally published. The photographs show Monroe reading the transcript of her interview and moving through a range of emotions, from joy to quiet reflection. Taken together, the images challenge the idea that she was merely captured by others. Instead, they suggest collaboration.
The same idea runs through the centenary display of Monroe’s personal belongings in Los Angeles, where objects from the Icon Collection include clothing, documents, photographs and film memorabilia. Among the items is what the collector believes was the final cheque Monroe signed on the day of her death, tied to furniture deliveries for her newly purchased Brentwood home. The collection also includes a mirror from that home, along with unfinished gowns, comfort clothing and designs by Pucci. These items widen the lens again: the private woman, the public figure, and the deliberate construction between them.
What the centenary changes for audiences beyond cinema
Seen together, the exhibitions and displays mark a rare institutional effort to reinterpret Monroe across film, portraiture and material culture. Victoria Siddall, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, said Monroe remains one of the most recognizable people in modern history and that the centenary exhibition explores her extraordinary life, influence and enduring legacy. That language matters because it places Monroe within a broader cultural system, not just a single biography.
The wider impact stretches beyond the UK. The BFI re-release of The Misfits and the New York preview of Monroe’s belongings both indicate renewed institutional interest in how female stardom is constructed, preserved and sold. The story is not simply that Monroe remains famous. It is that the terms of her fame are still being revised.
For bfi, the centenary season becomes a test of whether audiences are willing to move past the image they already know and confront the performer inside it. If Monroe was, as Sheehan argued, the original triple threat, then the question now is whether the culture that consumed her can finally meet her work on its own terms.
