Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe, the legendary sex-symbol of the fifties and sixties, was born in 1926 as Norma Jean Baker. She decided to change her name and make it more glamorous, as she was convinced that the right name can help an actress a lot in becoming famous and admired.
She spent most of her childhood in children's homes and orphanages because her mother was emotionally and mentally unstable: she was involved constantly in unhappy relationships with men, and spent a lot of time in hospitals and sanatoriums.
She first married when she was 16, but her husband soon went off to war in the Pacific and the marriage broke up. Later she married Joe Di Maggio, an American baseball star, and then a famous playwright, Arthur Miller, yet none of these marriages was really happy. She was believed to have had a lot of love affairs, among which the most famous was the alleged relationship with President J.F. Kennedy.
She entered the film business through modelling - she had her first photographs during World War II in a magazine for soldiers. The characters she played were mainly naive, sexy blondes looking for true love, preferably a rich man who would take care of them. She tried to break with this stereotype in a few films but her fans seemed to love her more as a beautiful sex goddess than as a gifted actress.
She found it hard to cope withe the pressure of the film industry, as well as her private life, and took to drinking. She died in 1962 of an overdose of drugs - her biographers still argue over whether it was an accident or suicide.