Marilyn Monroe wasn’t who we thought she was ...Middle East

“You can read about yourself and somebody else’s ideas about you,” so said Marilyn Monroe, “but what’s important is how you feel about you.” It’s just one of the pithy quotations for which the iconic actress is known – her insights range from the benefits of imperfection (“it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring”) and self-confidence (“if you can’t handle me at my worst, you can’t handle me at my best”) to the sort of irreverent witticisms that jazz up the walls of bottomless brunch restaurants and the women’s toilets of cocktail bars worldwide (“give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world”).

And yet the familiarity of her words pales into insignificance compared with the ubiquity of her image. Monroe the person is, for most people, almost entirely divorced from Monroe the picture, Monroe the goddess, Monroe the pinnacle of femininity. But the question of “how you feel about you” felt particularly apt emblazoned on the wall of the new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, which celebrates her centenary and opens today.

In this impeccably curated collection of photographs and paintings – along with some exquisite original dresses, her makeup and her correspondence with friends and lovers – we see Monroe from every angle: from her teen years to the year of her death, aged 36, in 1962; in dresses, in jeans, and in the nude. Yet no matter how many pictures you look at, she becomes no less mysterious a figure. If anything, she becomes more unknowable: she is consistently seen through the eyes of others.

Monroe is, of course, a particularly exciting subject for an exhibition because plenty of the people who captured her are some of the most iconic artists and photographers of the era. Andy Warhol’s 1962 portraits are resplendent here in all their gaudy glory, and the photographs are simply stunning. From Cecil Beaton’s Vogue shoots to Eve Arnold’s soft, candid gaze, from Philippe Halsman’s joyful jumps to Ed Feingersh’s intimate shots of Monroe in New York City, every picture seems to prove why photographers fell over themselves to get near her with a camera.

The most famous images are of her in the middle of her short career, in which she starred in classic Hollywood films like Some Like It Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, smiling and thriving – but the most striking in the exhibition are those at either end. The pictures of her as a teenager, when she was still “Norma Jeane” (she took the stage name Marilyn Monroe in 1946 and legally changed it a decade later), with brown frizzy hair and no make-up, humanise her.

Equally, the last photos of her ever taken, by the photographer George Barris on Santa Monica Beach, just a few weeks before she died of a barbiturate overdose thought to be suicide, show something of the colder reality of her life: she looks tired, her make-up working hard, her smile and her sparkle seeming suddenly more effortful.

All of it is particularly striking when you consider it in contrast to the age of celebrity we’re currently in – the one for which Monroe’s astronomical fame laid the foundations. This era is defined by the fact that, through social media, celebrities do have a degree of ownership of their own image. They have the opportunity to paint themselves in the way they want to be seen; we, the public, now rely on celebrities’ depictions of themselves as the most reliable evidence for who they are. Even if we don’t believe the images themselves, the choices they have made about what to post tell us a lot.

Take Kim Kardashian, for example: a woman who clearly aspires to Monroe-levels of fame, and who is – with her reality TV show and her selfies – emblematic of 21st-century celebrity. That Kardashian wore Monroe’s iconic Jean Louis dress, covered in crystals, to the 2022 Met Gala was itself a bold statement on who she thought she was and how she wanted to be seen. But the two are worlds apart because of how much she has shared, how much she has curated and how the public sees her. Someone who has become famous through putting their life on television (or, indeed, social media) can never be a mystery. And that’s exactly why Monroe’s legacy has endured – we are still trying to piece her together.

Monroe’s mental health problems, thought ultimately to have led to her suicide, are now widely recognised – and knowing what we do now about the pressures of being extremely famous, particularly from such a young age, they are perhaps unsurprising. Yet during her lifetime, they were hidden from view – a fact that serves to highlight the chasm between her public image and inner self, and the extent to which that gap has now closed for those in the public eye.

An obvious comparison is Britney Spears, who also became very famous in her teens and experienced problems in later life as a result. There was no hiding her breakdown, which happened at the peak of paparazzi culture – but crucially, nobody wanted to hide it. It was a way of better knowing her, of being closer to her; it seems to me that, in Monroe’s lifetime, when global celebrity was still a burgeoning phenomenon, the public would sooner take the fantasy.

In recent years, Britney has taken to Instagram following the release from her conservatorship, posting videos and photographs that appear to show her in an unstable mental state. While Monroe’s tragedy and victimhood can be romanticised, the dark secrets pitted in contrast to the perfect images, there is no such possibility for our modern stars. Their unravelling is documented in real time, with nothing unsayable, nothing off-limits.

You wonder how Monroe – already ogled at, pressurised and overexposed – might have fitted into this age of social media – whether she would have relished the opportunity to present herself to the world in her own words and through her own camera, or whether the new, additional pressures would have proved too much. Monroe was the most photographed woman of the 20th century. Now, there are so many people with an equivalent level of fame that she would barely touch the sides. Perhaps more to the point, we all take so many photos of ourselves and others that the statistic is barely worth commenting on at all.

“I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have,” said Monroe once. For all her qualities as the ultimate Hollywood export, this should come as no surprise: we know by now that Monroe was intelligent, savvy, complex and troubled. Far from the kind of goofy, gold-digging bimbo she often depicted onscreen, she had a rich inner life.

The National Portrait Gallery exhibition is stunning – an entrancing whirlwind of beauty, charisma, fantasy and tragedy. But the most beautiful thing there, to me, was a self-portrait: a tiny drawing, about the size of a receipt, hanging apart from the photographs. It’s titled “What the Hell… That’s Life”. No fluttering dresses, half-open lips, New York skylines, champagne or fresh white sheets. It’s just a few expressive lines of ink and pencil and a cheerful face. Next to the grandeur of the other images, it seems unremarkable. But it shows us just a little of how Monroe felt about herself.

‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ is at the National Portrait Gallery until 6 September. Tickets available here

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