Quotes About Marilyn Share | Options

[Robby]

There isn't enough upper lip between the end of your nose and your mouth.
- Emmeline Sniveley to Norma Jeane Dougherty

I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures.
She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson, when a moviestar had to look beautiful,
and she got seks like Jean Harlow.
- Leon Shamroy, on MM's first screentest 1946

When you look at Marilyn on the screen, you don't want anything bad to happen
to her. You really care that she should be allright ... Happy.
- Natalie Wood

Marilyn's insecurities screamed out of her.
If she had a an eight o' clock date, I had to be there at noon to start on her.
If I was two minutes late she would be furious, though she thought nothing of
keeping others waiting for hours or days.
- George Masters

This is a little kid who wants to be with other little kids sucking lollipops
and watching rollercoaster, but she can't because they won't let her.
She's frightened to death of that the public which thinks she is so sexy.
My God, if they only knew!
- Allan 'Whitey' Snyder

She was not the usual movie idol. There was something democratic about her.
She was the type who would join in and wash up the supper dishes even if you
didn't asked her.
- Carl Sandburg

We were in mid-flight, and there was a nut on the plane.
- Billy Wilder on MM and the shooting of 'Some Like It Hot'

[Tara]

"Nobody discovered her, she earned her own way to stardom."
-- Darryl Zanuck, president of 20th Century Fox

"She had a great natural dignity and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive."
-- Edith Sitwell, poet

"Marilyn was an incredible person to act with...the most marvelous I ever worked with, and I have been working for 29 years."
Montgomery Clift

"The trouble with Marilyn was she didn't trust her own judgment, always had someone around to depend on. Coaches, so-called friends. Even me."
Allan 'Whitey' Snyder

"She's one of the few stars who don't act as if she's made it. She does not coast. She worked harder in Let's Make Love than she did in Clash by Night. She's still the same person."
Jerry Wald

"Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: 'How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?' Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can't believe that life wasn't important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere."
Marlon Brando

This post has been edited by Tara: Feb 22 2006, 07:47 PM

[Robby]

One of the most unappreciated people in the world.
- Joshua Logan

Marilyn is a dreamy girl. She's the kind who's liable to show up
with one white shoe and one black shoe.
- Jane Russell

When she's there, she's there. All of her is there! She's there to work.
- Clark Gable

There's a broad with a fututre behind her.
- Constance Bennet

I had always thought that all those amusing remarks she was supposed
to have made for the press had probably been manufactured
and mimeographed by her press agent, but they weren't.
She was a very bright person, an instinct type.
- Photographer Eliott Erwitt

She's worth all the trouble.
- Joshua Logan to Laurence Olivier

[Tara]

"To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes."
-Arthur Miller

"Marilyn is as near a genius as any actress I ever knew. She is an artist beyond artistry. She is the most completely realized and authentic film actress since Garbo. She has that same unfathomable mysteriousness. She is pure cinema."
-- Joshua Logan, director of Bus Stop

"She went right down into her own personal experience for everything, reached down and pulled something out of herself that was unique and extraordinary. She had no techniques. It was all the truth, it was only Marilyn. But it was Marilyn, plus. She found things, found things about womankind in herself."
-- John Huston, director of The Asphalt Jungle and The Misfits

[Charli]

Still she hangs like a bat in the heads of the men who met her, and none of us will ever forget her.
-Sammy Davis, Jr.

Look at that face-she could be five years old.
-Laurence Olivier

I did know her, and out of that sentiment for her, I could never talk about her for publication.
-Marlon Brando

It may sound peculiar to say so, because she is no longer with us, but we were very close. Once when we were doing that picture together, I got a call on the set: my younger daughter had had a fall. I ran home and the one person to call was Marilyn. She did an awful lot to boost things up for movies when everything was at a low state; there'll never be anyone like her for looks, for attitude, for all of it.
-Betty Grable

This post has been edited by Charli: Feb 23 2006, 11:27 PM

[Robby]

It's not fun being married to an electric light.
- Joe DiMaggio

Marilyn wanted only herself to look like Marilyn Monroe. But is he'd lived,
I think she wanted no one else to look anything like her and nothing or nobody
to detract from her.
- George Masters

She'd come out of our apartment in a shleppy old coat, looking
like my maid, and all the people would push her aside to get my
autograph. She loved it.
- Shelley Winters

It is my feeling that Marilyn looked forward to her tomorrows.
- Eunice Murray

Blonde and beautiful Marilyn Monroe, a glamourous symbol of the
gay, exciting life of Hollywood, died tragically Sunday. Her body
was found nude in bed, a probably suicide. She was 36. The longtroubled
star clutched a telephone in one hand. An empty bottle of sleeping pills
was nearby.
- The Associated Press, August 6, 1962

She stood life. he radiated life. In her smile hope was always present.
She glorified in life, and her death did not mar this final image.
She had become a legend in her own time. And in her death, took her
place among the myths of our century.
- John Kobal

[Charli]

"With all her radience, she was shrouded in darkness"
-Arthur Miller

[marilyn]

"She seemed very shy, and I remember that when the studio workers would whistle at her, it seemed to embarrass her."
Cary Grant, co-star in Monkey Business

"I did Niagara with her. I found her marvelous to work with and terrifically ambitious to do better. And bright. She may not have had an education, but she was just naturally bright."
Henry Hathaway, director of the 1952 film

"She represents to man something we all want in our unfulfilled dreams. A man, he's got to be dead not to be excited by her."
Jean Negulesco, director of How to Marry a Millionaire

"She saw herself drowning in Hollywood in 1955 and told her studio, 'I'm not just wiggling my behind.' Marilyn is not any one thing; she's multidimensional. As an actress, she has lots of imitators- but only Marilyn survives."
Eli Wallach, Marilyn's co-star in The Misfits

"I love Marilyn Monroe. I think she was the coolest blonde. I think like me she just didn't care what anyone thinks. She's happy. She's smiling. I don't know, I just always thought she was so beautiful and she just seemed, like, magical."
Paris Hilton

[Tara]

"I know people who say 'Hollywood broke her heart,' and all that, but I don't believe it. She was very observant and tough minded and appealing, but she adored and trusted the wrong people. She was very courageous-you know the book Twelve Against the Gods? Marilyn was like that, she had to challenge the gods at every turn."
--George Cukor, director

"Marilyn always dreamt of being an actress. She didn't, by the way, dream of being just a star. She dreamt of being an actress. And she had always lived somehow with that dream. And that is why, despite the fact that she became one of the most unusual and outstanding stars of all time, she herself was never satisfied. When she came to New York, she began to perceive the possibilities of really accomplishing her dream, of being an actress."
--Lee Strasberg

"They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original."
--Billy Wilder

[Charli]

"I have never met anyone as mean...or as fabulous on screen!"-
Billy Wilder....(I agree with the second thing he said!) (IMG:http://www.everlasting-star.net/boards/style_emoticons/default/rolleyes1.gif) (IMG:http://www.everlasting-star.net/boards/style_emoticons/default/throb.gif) (IMG:http://www.everlasting-star.net/boards/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Tara]

I don't think I have ever seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her-- as if talking to someone under water. Bobby (Kennedy) and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me- but then she receded into her own glittering mist.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Diary entry dated May 19, 1962 (on the night of JFK's birthday gala)

He was really fascinated by her, but that's like saying about someone who is so fascinated by animals that they put them in a cage so they can study them. In that sense you could say he loved her. He did have this great generosity in his work, although usually he never considered the needs of anyone else before himself. His gift to Marilyn, his great gift, was that he took her seriously in her work, and even professionally, too, up to a point. Marilyn was there more than anyone before had been. Lee adored her; at least he seemed to do anything to please her. She loved champagne, he got champagne. He didn't react like that with other people. His relationship with her was more complex than with the others. And at least she didn't ignore me.

Johnny Strasberg on his father and Marilyn


When I first met her she overwhelmed me. I had never met anyone like her. She possessed a quality that I would call almost feline-like. She also seemed totally at home with her own body. She let her emotions come through her body. What made her different, I wondered? Why do we worship her? There was something quite unique about her that caused you to watch her carefully, as though she was one of a kind, very precious. I found it fascinating to walk and talk with her. It was exciting though at the same time it undid me. I was aware I was in the presence of a great star. I had met other movie people in our home but I never had this 'wow!' feeling about anyone.

Joan Greenson, daughter of Dr Ralph Greenson

This post has been edited by Tara: Mar 2 2006, 07:05 PM

[ellen]

oooooh tara love arthur's comment about the glittering mist (IMG:http://www.everlasting-star.net/boards/style_emoticons/default/birthdaymmsing_190_146.gif)

[Tara]

oooooh tara love arthur's comment about the glittering mist (IMG:http://www.everlasting-star.net/boards/style_emoticons/default/birthdaymmsing_190_146.gif)

Yeah I love that phrase too, it always comes to mind when I think of Marilyn on that night.

[Tara]

Damnit, this shouldn't have happened! Something should have been done! She was cheap, an exhibitionist. She was never a professional, and that irritated the hell out of people. But, for God's sake, she needed help. She had all these people on her payroll. Where the hell were they when she needed them? Why in the hell did she have to die alone?

Joan Crawford, speaking to George Cukor on the night after Marilyn's death


There's no need now to argue her quality as an actress, or the degree to which she was a victim of a cruel system or her own worst enemy. What was clear, immediately, on hearing of her death, was the way in which this lovely girl had meant something, anything, to everyone- whether she liked it or not; whether she had the faintest idea of how to control the wild circus... People blamed Twentieth Century-Fox for Monroe's death, the studio that had at last run out of patience with her. And over the years, nearly every other segment of our society, from the federal government to the Mafia, has been listed among the suspects. But maybe that says more about the breadth of her appeal than actual lethal intent.

Film Critic David Thomson

This post has been edited by Tara: Mar 3 2006, 08:08 PM

[Tara]

There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was an invention of hers. A genius invention that she created, like an author creates a character. So when Marilyn Monroe put on a sequin dress and danced in the studio—I mean for hours she danced and sang and flirted, and did this thing. There is no describing what she did, she did Marilyn Monroe . . . And then there was the inevitable drop because she was someone who went very high up and very way down. And when night was over, she sat in the corner like a child with everything gone. But I wouldn't photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.

Richard Avedon

[SusenSkellington]

"She was beautiful and untouched, it was as though she were just beginning."
-- Bert Stern

[Charli]

I have the same problem as Marilyn. We attract people the way honey does bees, but they're generally the wrong kind of people. People who want something from us - if only our energy. We need a period of being alone to become ourselves.
-Montgomery Clift

She seemed to have a kind of unconscious glow about her physical self that was innocent, like a child. When she posed nude, it was 'Gee, I arn kind of, you know, sort of dishy,' like she enjoyed it without being egotistical.
-Elizabeth Taylor

[SusenSkellington]

She will go on eternally.
--Jackie Kennedy

She's one of the few stars who don't act as if she's made it. She does not coast. She worked harder in Let's Make Love than she did in Clash by Night. She's still the same person.
--Jerry Wald

Joe DiMaggio may not have made a good husband for Marilyn, but no one cared more for her. He was always, before the divorce, and after the divorce, her best friend.
--Allan 'Whitey' Snyder

[Tara]

Her life has become a roadmap, a study for other actresses. She has made every actress since her time aware of her. She's a light that can't be denied. She's a kind of unidentifiable artist. She's not just a sex symbol but a symbol for every actor to follow because she never gave up, nothing was enough, she had to go on to be the best. She had become a kind of buoy to remind us of the dangerous rocks in the water.

Beverly D'Angelo
Actress best known for her roles in Hair and as country singing legend Patsy Cline in Coal Miner's Daughter
(D'Angelo also once played Marilyn Monroe in a Canadian radio play, "Hey, Marilyn!")

[Tara]

Juliette Lewis on playing Marilyn in 'Room To Rent'....

"For the role I wanted to be overly feminine, taking care how to sit, how to carry your shoulders, the lip quiver. I really liked being a blonde except for the root tinting. I played around with my voice, softened it, because mine is very low. "

"Impersonators tap into the cliché of the person, I think Marilyn Monroe was a very intelligent person who knew what she was doing, she knew her comic skills. But socially she did put on that lip quiver and that dizzy blonde act and I think when I played it, it was so comfortable to do. You don't have to engage in an intellectual way with people, you can hide behind this dizzy veneer and its also very disarming to people around you. I connected to the champagne buzz aspect of Marilyn."