On a grey Tuesday morning, a procession of platinum-blonde women in white halter dresses gathered outside the British Film Institute. They were not actors, but ordinary women who spend their weekends embodying a ghost. The occasion was the centenary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth, and the archives had pulled out reels of her lesser-known British performances. What struck me was not the nostalgia, but the quiet desperation in the air. These women, some of whom had travelled from Manchester and Cardiff, were not just celebrating a star. They were performing a ritual of collective memory in an age of digital amnesia.
Monroe’s image has been repackaged so many times that her real face has become a meme. But here, in the flickering light of the BFI’s screening room, there was a different feeling. The audience watched her 1956 film 'The Prince and the Showgirl', shot at Pinewood Studios, and laughed at her deliberate comic pauses. One lookalike, a nurse named Julie, told me she started dressing as Monroe after her mother died. “It’s a way of being someone else for a while,” she said. “But also a way of connecting with her. Marilyn seemed so lonely, didn’t she?”
That loneliness is the true currency of Monroe’s legacy. The British Film Archives have digitised her entire UK oeuvre, but the real archive is in the hearts of women who still see in her a reflection of their own fragility. The cultural shift here is subtle: we no longer worship Monroe as a sex symbol, but as a patron saint of vulnerability. In the age of the curated Instagram feed, her unguarded moments feel revolutionary.
There is a class dimension too. The lookalikes I spoke to were mostly working-class women for whom Monroe represents a kind of glamour that is both aspirational and attainable. One woman, a hairdresser from Liverpool, said: “She wasn’t posh. She was like us, but she made it.” That sense of upward mobility through sheer presence is a powerful myth, especially in a Britain where social mobility has stalled.
The BFI’s exhibition includes her costumes and letters. One letter, to her hairdresser, reads: “Please make me look like I’m not trying.” It is a poignant request from a woman who spent her life trying.
As the screenings ended, the lookalikes posed for photographs outside, their white dresses billowing in the wind. A tourist asked if they were part of a wedding. “No,” one replied, laughing. “We’re just keeping a memory alive.” And that, perhaps, is the most human thing we can do: to dress up as our own ghosts on the birthday of a dream.
