BFI and National Portrait Gallery Mark Monroe Centenary
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- BFI's "Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star" opens 1 June and runs through the end of July, structured around three strands: Star Attractions (musicals and comedies), Dramatic Turns (serious roles), and Scene Stealers (smaller but pivotal appearances).
- BFI Distribution is re-releasing Monroe's final completed film, "The Misfits" (1961) — directed by John Huston and written by her then-husband Arthur Miller — in cinemas across the UK and Ireland.
- National Portrait Gallery's "Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait" runs from June to September, featuring works by Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty, and Richard Avedon, alongside previously unseen photographs by Allan Grant taken at Monroe's Brentwood home the day before her death in August 1962.
- The exhibitions cast Monroe as a "pioneering creative force" who challenged the studio system, protested poor-quality scripts, and became the first woman since the silent era to set up her own production company.
- BFI lead programmer Kimberley Sheehan argued Monroe's cultural saturation has eclipsed her work, noting her image is now "one of the most common prompts in AI-generated images," and that audiences know "the image, the gossip, the tragedies" but not the films.
- Sheehan compared Monroe's attempted reinvention to Taylor Swift and Madonna, saying she "could have been a Margot Robbie — someone with huge capital in her image, but also a terrific performer and a smart, active producer."
- Born 1 June 1926, Monroe moved from pin-up work as Norma Jeane to one of the most photographed people in the world, directing shoots and vetoing images she disliked — a collaborative approach the NPG exhibition highlights.
Why it matters: The centenary gives two flagship UK cultural institutions a platform to reposition Monroe from object-of-gaze to author-of-her-own-image, backed by rare screen access (The Misfits re-release) and unseen Allan Grant photographs. The BFI's AI-images framing also gives the reframing contemporary relevance: Monroe's likeness is now default training data, making a case for her as producer and performer newly urgent.
