A hundred years since her birth, Marilyn Monroe is commemorated by lookalikes and cultural commentators, all praising her as a 'British cultural export.' This designation would have amused her, given that she was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles, not London. Yet the appropriation speaks volumes: Monroe has become a universal cipher, a blank screen onto which we project our fantasies of glamour, tragedy, and transatlantic longing.
The lookalike parades are a curious form of devotion. These women, painted and posed into identical masks, seek to embody an absence. Monroe herself was a master of such illusion: the breathy voice, the platinum hair, the walk that was part vaudeville, part fever dream. But her life was a cautionary tale of exploitation. She was consumed by the studio system, by the Kennedys, by a public that demanded both saint and sinner. Her death at 36 was a final, desperate act of escape from the very image we now celebrate.
To call Monroe a 'British cultural export' is to ignore the messy reality. Her fame was forged in Hollywood, but her myth found fertile ground in Britain. Perhaps it is because we love a fallen aristocrat of the soul. Our own Princess Diana, another icon of tragic beauty, walked a similar path. Monroe’s appeal to the British psyche lies in her vulnerability, her whispered confidences, her ability to be both available and untouchable.
But let us not romanticise. This centenary is a commercial exercise, a chance to sell vintage posters, perfume, and retro dresses. The lookalikes are walking advertisements. Real Monroe was a woman who struggled with addiction, depression, and a desperate desire to be taken seriously as an actress. She studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, but the world preferred her dumb blonde act. Her legacy is a hall of mirrors where we see only ourselves.
What does it say about our culture that we venerate a woman who was systematically used and discarded? We prefer the image to the reality. Monroe in the subway grate, skirt billowing, remains our eternal poster child for a kind of innocent eroticism that never existed. The latest generation of lookalikes will pose, smile, and fade, just as the original did. We will buy the tickets, the books, the biopics, and we will never ask whether we have learned anything at all.
The Victorians had their mournful cults of dead poets; we have our dead movie stars. Monroe’s centenary is not a celebration but a wake for a culture that has run out of original idols. She is our Lady of the Celluloid, a secular saint whose suffering we ignore in favour of her smile. Perhaps in another hundred years, lookalikes will still walk the streets, and we will still be chasing the ghost of a woman who never truly existed. And that, dear reader, is the tragedy we refuse to recognise.
