Though the world turned its back on Norma Jean Baker long ago, more than half a century after her death it seems that History may never finish deconstructing her alter ego, Marilyn Monroe. It was Ben Lyon, ex movie-star and a 20th Century Fox executive, who gave her that name, after toying with the idea of ‘Carole Lind’, a cross-pollination of two of Lyon’s favourite movie stars – Carole Lombard and Jenny Lind. On seeing the results of Monroe’s first screen test, Lyon delightedly pronounced: “It’s Jean Harlow all over again”. And, throughout her life, identity remained one of Monroe’s problems. Nobody, including Monroe herself, was ever sure who she was or where she stood in relation to people around her. As a child, she fantasised that Clark Gable was her father. She called her third and last husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, ‘Papa’. Watching the spine-chilling film clip of Monroe singing “Happy Birthday to You” to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in May 1962, there are moments when you feel that a more appropriate song might have been “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, which would have added an incestuous element to their worrisome relationship. Kennedy’s response at the time was: “Thank you. I can now retire from politics after having “Happy Birthday” sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way”. It was one of Monroe’s many unfortunate talents that she had the ability to provoke the most ersatz verbal responses from the great.

The great, the good, and the not-so-good have all pronounced on Monroe’s beauty and her talent. Quotes abound on websites that bear her name – from the men and fans in her life, from the workers in the industry that imprisoned her, and from Monroe herself. John Huston, who directed her in an early film, The Asphalt Jungle, had no doubt about her talent: “She went right down into her personal experience for everything. She had no techniques. It was all the truth, it was only Marilyn…”, though he went on to add that Monroe impressed him more off the screen than on. Groucho Mark, who acted with her in an even earlier film, Love Happy, saw her as a mixture of “Theda Bara, Mae West and Bo-Peep all rolled into one”. Billy Wilder reckoned that as a comedic actress she was “an absolute genius”. Laurence Olivier, after initial doubts, called her “an extremely skilled actress”, but maybe this is an indication that Monroe could bring out the ‘ham’ that regularly hovered just below the surface of Britain’s most famous Knight of the Theatre.

Monroe’s opinion of herself periodically rose and fell throughout her life. She had dreams rather than ambition, but threw the occasional penetrating glance into the shadows of her world. She once described Hollywood as “a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul” – in modern money the kiss would now cost maybe $10,000, but the soul might still be pegged at 50 cents. She told Michael Chekhov, one of her acting coaches: “I want to be an artist, not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac,” a statement that reveals both thought and intelligence, but too often it remained a hope unfulfilled.

The camera was seldom far away from Monroe, as books and magazines testify today. We see Norma Jean as cute baby, pouting toddler, gawky nine-year-old, and cheesecake adolescent – a childhood during which people close to her died and disappeared, bringing disarray into an already confused life. There is Norma Jean as the teenager in slacks and sweaters, smiling her way through unplanned pregnancies and an ill-planned marriage. There are studio portraits of the young woman who was now Marilyn Monroe, in shorts and T-shirt, with a wide and glittering smile but dead eyes, trying so hard to turn the dream into reality. Later portraits show how well Monroe learnt the art (or is it the trick?) of convincing the camera that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The happiest pictures are those in which the smile is muted, and the most commercially successful are those in which sex appeal has, not so much the upper hand, but certainly the lower lip.

Posterity has decided which portraits of her are to be the perennial favourites: Eisenstaedt’s 1953 photographic session, those taken on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Baron’s photographs of her at Palm Springs in 1954; the publicity stills for The Seven Year Itch; the at-home casuals taken at the Miller’s apartment on 57th Street in New York City. She was the World’s No.1 pin-up. She still is. Maybe she will always be. But she was also a waif, with that little-girl look that devastated so many of her fans: the waif we see on location for the shooting of The Misfits; or leaning on the balcony of a New York hotel room; or applying lipstick with a copy of The Thinking Body beside her.

The camera mercilessly recorded the end of Monroe, for by the summer of 1962 Hollywood no longer protected its stars from the glare of unwholesome publicity. By then the paparazzi were hunting for the slimmest of pickings from her life, and her death provided them with a feast – the front page headlines announcing her death, the room in which she died, the weeping mourners at her funeral and, forty years later, such macabre items as the order for the release of her body from the morgue.

The last words should be hers. “I knew how third-rate I was,” she said. “I could actually feel my lack of talent.” To the very end, Marilyn Monroe was out of touch with reality, to the extent that even in her self-criticism she was living and dying in a world of fantasy.

In collaboration with Endeavour London: www.endeavourlondon.com