Marilyn Monroe Would Have Turned 100 on June 1 — Here’s How Hollywood Is Marking the Centennial

She would have turned 100 on Sunday, June 1. More than 60 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe still commands enough attention that her centennial has produced a genuine cultural moment — not just nostalgia programming, but new books, new scholarship, and new scholarship asking what, exactly, it was about her that won’t let go.

The most-discussed arrival is Andrew Wilson’s I Wanna Be Loved by You: Marilyn Monroe: A Life in 100 Takes, a biography timed to the centennial that uses previously unheard interviews and personal letters to examine the private anguish behind a career that looked, from the outside, like a series of triumphs. Per Yahoo/Closer Weekly, Wilson’s book incorporates 2022 DNA test results that finally identified Charles Stanley Gifford as Monroe’s biological father — a question that had circulated for decades without official resolution. The book also draws on accounts from figures in her life including first husband Jim Dougherty and acting coach Natasha Lytess, and pulls in perspectives from Norman Rosten and director John Huston on how she was perceived by those closest to her work.

Wilson’s central argument, reflected in the title’s echo of the song Monroe made famous, is that she “wanted to be wanted” — and that the distance between that need and what celebrity could actually provide was where much of the tragedy lived.

The Pink Gown, in Person

For those who’d rather see Monroe than read about her, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles is opening its “Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon” installation on Sunday. The Los Angeles Times reports the centerpiece is the hot pink silk gown designed by William Travilla that Monroe wore in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — the dress she stands in, arms thrown wide, in one of the most replicated images in cinema history. The gown is part of a broader exhibition of costumes, photographs, and archival material.

A second book arriving later this summer reframes Monroe’s legacy from a different angle entirely. Jazzed: Jack Cole and Twentieth-Century American Dance, due August 11 from the University Press of Kentucky, is a biography of choreographer Jack Cole — the man who, working with Monroe directly, designed her walk, her gestures, and the specific physical vocabulary that made her so distinctively herself on screen. The argument the book makes is that Monroe’s physicality wasn’t simply natural magnetism; it was a built thing, a collaboration between performer and choreographer, and Cole’s role in creating what audiences responded to has largely been erased from the story.

Limited-edition Andy Warhol prints, new documentary projects, and retrospective screenings are rounding out a centennial that shows no sign of answering the basic question it keeps raising: why, of all the stars of her era, does she still feel like the one who got away.