Marilyn Monroe's star power shines brightly, 50 years after her death

[MuffyBee]

http://www.freep.com/article/20120805/ENT01/308050079/Marilyn-Monroe-s-star-power-shines-brightly-50-years-after-her-death
Marilyn Monroe's star power shines brightly, 50 years after her death
August 50, 2012

Only 11 years after her death, Elton John sang an ode to Marilyn Monroe. "And I would have liked to have known you, but I was just a kid," went the lyrics, written by Bernie Taupin. "Your candle burned out long before your legend ever did."

What John didn't know was how much truer those words would ring a few decades later.

Monroe passed away 50 years ago today, and her murky death remains one of Hollywood's most tantalizing mysteries. But look around: Her legend lives on, more vibrantly than ever. In a development this fiercely ambitious actress surely would have appreciated, the 1950s bombshell has become a 21st-Century pop culture phenomenon.

Just flip through a celebrity magazine: Some of-the-moment young starlet or pop singer will be channeling (or outright appropriating) those platinum locks; the bright red lips, moist and slightly parted, and that joyously, almost defiantly curvy figure, sheathed in something skin-tight and glamorous.
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[seahorse]

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000054/bio


Biography for Marilyn Monroe
1 June 1926, Los Angeles, California, USA


Date of Death
5 August 1962, Los Angeles, California, USA (drug overdose)


Birth Name
Norma Jeane Mortenson


Height
5' 5½" (1.66 m)


Trivia

Voted 'Sexiest Woman of the Century' by People Magazine. [1999]

Was 1947's Miss California Artichoke Queen.

Was roommates with Shelley Winters when they were both starting out in Hollywood.

Ranked #8 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. [October 1997]

Voted Empire's (UK) "sexiest female movie star of all time" in 1995.

She was Playboy's first "Sweetheart of the Month" in December 1953.

When she died in 1962 at age 36, she left an estate valued at $1.6 million. In her will, Monroe bequeathed 75% of that estate to Lee Strasberg, her acting coach, and 25% to Dr. Marianne Kris, her psychoanalyst. A trust fund provided her mother, Gladys Baker Eley, with $5,000 a year. When Dr. Kris died in 1980, she passed her 25% on to the Anna Freud Centre, a children's psychiatric institute in London. Since Strasberg's death in 1982, his 75% has been administered by his widow, Anna, and her lawyer, Irving Seidman.

More...

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000054/bio