Original subtitles

Come on, everybody. Let's give the little girl a great big welcome.

APPLAUSE

BAND PLAYS

By the time Marilyn was shooting

There's No Business Like Show Business, she was a huge star.

She is this beautiful, larger-than-life icon.

# After you...you get what you want You don't want it... #

After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It -

that's a perfect number because that's really her story, too.

# Because after you get what you want

# You don't want what you wanted... #

She had the money, and the lights, and the costumes, and the fans...

# I know you! #

..but there was something missing.

She doesn't want to be stuck at Fox making stereotype movies.

I could have sworn you were a dramatic actress.

You think that's impossible?

What I'd like to do is to be a good actress.

When you want that,

you're not necessarily going to find it in Hollywood.

There's No Business Like Show Business opens to great fanfare -

but Marilyn is nowhere to be seen.

Marilyn Monroe didn't show up for her own movie premiere.

Her mind and her life were already somewhere else.

She is incognito as Zelda Zonk.

Zelda Zonk was a beautiful woman in a black bobbed wig...

sneaking away from LA

to start a new life in New York.

She didn't tell anybody anything, and nobody knew.

Marilyn walked out as a declaration of independence.

She wanted control of her own destiny.

She was saying "I don't want just this any more.

"I have so much more to offer the world - and I'm gonna show them."

By deciding to break the contract and go to New York

Marilyn was announcing that she belonged with the serious artists,

that she belonged where real art was being made.

She wanted more control over her career.

She wanted to be able to choose her own projects and her own directors

and just play different roles.

Weeks after fleeing Hollywood,

a small crowd is invited to an Upper East Side apartment

to meet the new Marilyn Monroe.

Everybody was having a good time - drinks, hors d'oeuvres.

Lawyers were there. A lot of press was there.

They're all waiting on tenterhooks

to find out what Marilyn is going to say,

what she's going to announce, and if indeed this is some new Marilyn.

She wore high heels, and then the white Norell dress

and then the piece de resistance was the white ermine coat.

The bulbs were going like crazy.

Snappy, snappy, snappy, snappy.

Marilyn announces she's setting up her own film company...

..Marilyn Monroe Productions.

Setting up a production company in her name.

She didn't use anything like "Blonde Goddess Productions" or something.

Everybody's going, "Huh?"

For a woman during the Hollywood studio system

to really decide, "I'm gonna step out on my own"

is really astounding to think about.

At that time, that was almost unprecedented.

A very feminist act but also a very powerful act.

Marilyn's new business partner is photographer Milton Greene.

They were deep friends.

He loved beauty, and he loved to take great pictures

and she appreciated that.

He never told her to take the shirt off,

he never told her to lift her skirt.

Mutual respect.

The whole purpose behind this production company

was so that she could throw herself into the types of roles

that she had been wanting to do her whole life.

She knew it was time not to stop being Marilyn Monroe,

but to expand everybody's ideas of who Marilyn Monroe could be.

It wasn't until the next day when the newspapers came out

that they realised what a disaster it had been.

The few journalists that even bothered

to write about Marilyn Monroe Productions

speculated that Marilyn would be a failure, that she was a joke.

Women didn't do that.

Women didn't make their own movies. Are you crazy?

It was really unfair and very sexist of the press

to not give her the respect

that what she was doing was ground-breaking,

that that was revolutionary.

Back in Hollywood, the news reaches Fox studio boss Darryl Zanuck.

He hadn't shown her much professional courtesy

and so she left him to find out about it in the papers the next day.

Basically, he was the last to know, and he wasn't happy about that.

He felt, "I made her a star.

"Who would she be without 20th Century Fox?

"She owes us. That's it, boom."

He was so used to being able to treat actresses as bodies

and not have to deal with them

having any sense of power or control at all.

It was ludicrous to think that this dumb blonde

could possibly be in charge of her own productions

or choose her own directors or her own scripts.

There is a tremendous sense that she's David against Goliath,

that she cannot fight 20th Century Fox,

that she shouldn't even try.

But Marilyn has a plan.

Tonight we'll be going first to western Connecticut

where photographer Milton Greene, his wife,

and her friend and house guest Marilyn Monroe

will be waiting for us.

Edward R Murrow was far and away

the most respected journalist in America.

If you went on Murrow,

you were there to talk about something serious.

Ed, this is my wife, Amy.

Good evening, Mr Murrow.

CBS had to build a tower 150 feet high on our lawn,

and they were there ten days.

Oh, I had the best time!

How do you do, Mr Murrow. Good evening, Marilyn.

It was kind of a real power move on her part

to show Zanuck, "Here I am being interviewed.

"I'm still here, and I'm not backing down."

She was a fighter in a really big way.

MURROW: What's the basic reason for this corporation?

Primarily to contribute to help making good pictures.

Or would it be fair to say that you got rather tired of playing

the same kind of roles all the time

and wanted to try something different?

It's not that I object to doing musicals or comedy.

In fact, I rather enjoy it.

But I would like to do, also, dramatic parts, too.

Marilyn refuses to return to Fox

unless Zanuck gives her the control she wants.

Instead, he threatens legal action.

By this point, the antipathy between Marilyn and Darryl Zanuck

was very real, it ran deep, and they were both determined to win.

So it really was a battle of the wills

and it was kind of a battle to the death.

NEWSREEL: This is New York,

the largest single concentration of theatres, operas, musical halls

and entertainment centres.

Marilyn is embracing her new life in New York City.

It's the people.

I like the streets.

The atmosphere, I just like it.

Guiding her is friend and photographer Sam Shaw.

Our first time we met Marilyn, I must have been about 16 years old.

We had this wonderful day at the Met.

She was so enthusiastic to learn about art and literature.

In New York, she could be herself a little bit more.

Yeah, it gave her more freedom,

and that was something she required, being a free spirit.

Marilyn discovers the music of the era.

JAZZ TRUMPET

Jazz at the end of the war

was the music of young African American soldiers

coming back and demanding their freedom.

It was a breakout music, it was a liberating music.

My very favourite person,

and I love her as a person as well as a singer,

I think she's the greatest, and that's Ella Fitzgerald.

SCAT SINGING

Ella Fitzgerald, she had a voice like an angel.

And Marilyn played her records all the time.

There's a lovely picture of them sitting together

where they look both kinda rough.

And you can tell that they're really tight friends.

There's a famous story that Ella Fitzgerald

was wanting to play the Mocambo Club

but the owner of the Mocambo didn't want Ella.

It was a mostly a whites-only club.

But when it did have black performers,

they had to be spectacularly beautiful.

And the owner of the Mocambo didn't really care

about Ella's immense talent if she wasn't, you know, hot and svelte.

Marilyn read this in the paper.

She got very annoyed.

So she called the manager and said, "Hi, this is Marilyn Monroe.

"And if you rebook Ella Fitzgerald,

"I will come every night to hear her sing - both shows."

This was the beginning of the civil rights movement

where the Ku Klux Klan was out.

What was Marilyn going to get out of that,

being that visible a friend with Ella Fitzgerald?

Nothing, nothing.

Advocating for somebody like Ella Fitzgerald -

when she did not have to and when it was unpopular -

this speaks to her principles.

Ella did say Marilyn Monroe was ahead of her time

and she didn't even know it.

While Marilyn is creatively expanding,

Darryl Zanuck is busy trying to replace her.

He believed that he could create another blonde movie star

and that audiences would love her just the same.

It's classic Darryl Zanuck to think that you could replace Marilyn

with Sheree North, replacing a body with another body of similar type.

The more that Zanuck pushed, the more that Marilyn came back

saying, "But the people make me a star,"

and so, from her point of view, just go direct to the audience,

who needs Zanuck?

And Marilyn knows exactly how to fight back.

The photoshoot that Marilyn did for Redbook magazine

was a really pivotal moment for her.

The choice of Redbook was definitely a symbolic one.

Redbook was geared at women,

and it had been running some serious journalism.

This was the exact opposite

of all of the posed heavily made-up photos

where she's looking right into the camera

saying, "I'm here to seduce you."

She was really questioning not, I think, just herself

but how to show herself differently.

Marilyn was trying to position herself as a kind of everywoman.

It has that vulnerable everyday kind of girl look -

working girl on a subway...

..with her cameraman!

In fact, Marilyn never really did ride the subway -

but the important thing is

she saw herself as a woman who rode the subway.

Marilyn applies this new realism to her acting.

The thing I'd like the most is to become a real actress.

I realise more and more the responsibility -

and it is a responsibility.

She wanted to be a deeper actor.

And for her generation of woman in her 20s,

the best place to learn to be an actor was the Actors Studio.

How would these people behave?

What would motivate me to behave that way?

Lee Strasberg used The Method,

and The Method said you had to do true things.

So everything had to be true.

Look, you look, and you always do...

It's an approach Lee defined one time

as training your imagination to respond

to imaginary circumstances as though they're real.

You went so much with the personal thing

that you lost some of the things that she has.

That was a shattering experience,

the first time I got up in front of him -

and it was like he had an X-ray machine in his eyes,

and he just went in.

Now, I'm sure that's the same thing that happened with Marilyn.

I think that might have been the bravest thing that she ever did,

because the people in those classes,

they actually looked down on Hollywood stars.

They saw the stars and the starlets

as very, very different than the real actors.

Lee Strasberg - I think probably he changed my life

more than any other human being.

Not everyone welcomes the new Marilyn.

Her last movie for Fox is about to open,

and Darryl Zanuck orchestrates a stunt to put her back in her place.

The whole energy of the response to her

was about resistance to the idea

that Marilyn Monroe could be anything other than a sex object,

and certainly that what she was not was an actress.

Oh, I think it's terrific.

Very nice, some girl.

I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

It's the same thing as ever, same... look at this basically upskirt shot.

I said, what has Marilyn Monroe got

that a million other women have and prefer not to show?

The two Marilyns were seen as somehow impossible to reconcile,

as if it isn't possible to imagine that a woman could be sexual,

and flirty, and giggle, and also be serious and be driven.

At the New York premiere of The Seven Year Itch

the press is on red alert.

No-one can be sure which Marilyn Monroe they're going to see.

NEWSREEL: A popular Broadway New York theatre

readying its glamour for the sneak preview of The Seven Year Itch

and its star, the incomparable Marilyn Monroe.

As the battle with 20th Century Fox rages on,

Marilyn attends the premiere with her estranged husband, Joe DiMaggio.

They had separated eight months earlier before she left Hollywood.

Here she was in the middle of evolving

and experiencing this new life

and now she's on the arm of her soon-to-be ex-husband.

It felt so artificial

and Marilyn hated that feeling. She hated a lie.

What few realise is that Marilyn's appearance with Joe

is a convenient cover story.

The summer of 1955 was a real idyllic summer for Marilyn.

She spent almost all of it on Long Island

and she finally got to do all of those summer family activities

that she never had the chance to do before.

There's one particular photograph where she's on a boat

and there's a man that we can just see from the back.

Nobody really knows who it is

but the general consensus is that it could have been Arthur Miller.

They were meeting because of shared people in New York...

..hanging out and having fun.

He, of course, was married at the time,

and Marilyn knows how it would look for this major film star

to be with a man who was still married.

Marilyn's least favourite word - home-wrecker.

She had a fear of being called a home-wrecker.

It'll be over a year

before Marilyn's relationship with Arthur Miller

becomes public knowledge.

Marilyn Monroe was someone who was attracted to intelligence.

So it makes sense that she would be attracted

to one of the foremost American intellectuals at the time.

He treated me as a human being

and he was a very sensitive human being

and he treated me as a sensitive person also.

It's obvious that she felt very protected by him

that he would take care of her.

And it certainly looked like... she adored him.

Marilyn ended the year with the same people she began the year with

and those were Milton and Amy Greene.

And she and Milton still don't know

if Marilyn Monroe Productions is going to actually take off or not.

They don't have any real movie deals.

They don't have any real funding.

The struggle with Zanuck and Fox had dragged on for a year,

and Marilyn was nearly out of funds.

In fact, the lawyers said

they could have gone bust without making a picture.

Marilyn had no idea if this entire experiment

was going to end in complete humiliation and disaster.

Finally on New Year's Eve, Marilyn receives a letter from Fox.

Marilyn twirled me around and said, "It's over!

"It's signed, sealed, and delivered."

She got everything she wanted, everything -

which was unheard of in 1955.

Fox offers Marilyn a new contract which gives her a higher salary,

director approval,

and the freedom to make films through her own production company.

It's very remarkable 20th Century Fox

gave Marilyn the deal that she wanted

and the control that she desired.

They ended up giving in because they knew that if they allowed her

to do the roles that she wanted to do,

that she would occasionally do roles for them

and they could keep getting those profits.

The magnitude of Marilyn's victory was huge.

She gets to return to Hollywood in a really triumphant way.

Tell me, Marilyn, is it true

that you submitted a list of directors that you would work with?

Um...

We only know the rumours we're hearing, you know.

I would rather say that I have director approval, and that is true.

Her first film under the new contract

will be the drama Bus Stop.

She gets approval of the director, Joshua Logan,

and she gets to really become involved with creating

the character that she's going to play in this film.

Marilyn had got to portray a role that she really wanted to do,

something that would stretch her as an actress -

but now she had to prove that she actually had what it takes.

She really was going to be on trial in front of everybody as an actress.

Finally, Marilyn has the serious acting role she's been fighting for.

In Bus Stop, Marilyn plays this kind of down-at-heel singer.

She has an Ozarks accent, which she perfected.

Nan got this job as a waitress

and I got to workin' in Liggett's Drug Store.

We can see that Marilyn Monroe's physicality

is being treated differently from earlier movies.

There's a different quality to it.

It's more realistic. It's less voyeuristic.

And, look, you can see by this just how straight my direction is.

River Gulch, that's where I started.

This is where I am now. And look where I'm going. Where?

Hollywood and Vine!

Looks like a dumb blonde, it talks like a dumb blonde,

but inside is this roiling person who's really full,

not just a stereotype.

He called me an ignorant hillbilly. How do you like that?

Well, ain't ya?

I don't mean ignorant. I mean, but you do come from the Ozarks.

I ain't some hillbilly since I was...

This was the first time that she was showing

her new style of acting developed at the Actors' Studio.

I've been trying to be somebody.

A much more realistic performance,

a performance that tapped into a new well of emotion

that we hadn't seen from Marilyn Monroe before.

Marilyn had learned tremendous dramatic and comedy technique.

She could really get into a character

and play it with great truth as well as humour.

The character is a kind of wannabe Marilyn, a failed starlet,

and they were trying to make her glamorous, and she was saying,

"No, this girl wouldn't be glamorous."

Marilyn insisted that her make-up had to be ghostly

because this woman never went out in sunlight.

HESITANTLY: # That old black magic

# Has me in its spell... #

She did the hardest thing to do.

She chose to play it like somebody who is not very good

at what they do but trying really hard to be good.

# Those i...cy fingers... #

That's very hard to accomplish

and to have it be adorable and funny.

Whereabouts were we, Henry?

"I should stay away."

It's very complex, what she's doing. It's multilayered.

# I should stay away

# But what can I do?

# I hear your name...

# And I'm...

# ..aflame! #

HE WHOOPS, CROWD CHEERS

# Aflame! #

WHISTLING, CHEERING

There is a real kind of aching loneliness

at the centre of her performance,

and in the middle of this love story.

The moment the film is running in the camera, Marilyn acts.

I think she is one of the most extraordinary actresses

that ever lived.

A lot of people said that she really deserved

an Academy Award nomination for that role.

She was awfully good in Bus Stop, awfully good.

Marilyn doesn't slow down. She's on to the next project.

She still had dreams of her own production company,

so Marilyn and Milton settled on purchasing the rights to a play

that was being performed by Laurence Olivier in England.

She loved the idea of working with Laurence Olivier.

He brought with him a level of gravitas,

and I think by him agreeing to be in a movie with her,

it showed that she was being taken seriously as an actress.

Marilyn's new venture

puts a recently divorced Arthur Miller in the spotlight.

Marilyn is going to England to film The Prince And The Showgirl.

Arthur Miller wants to accompany her, be with her,

and applies for a passport, and runs against a wall.

Are you a member of the Communist Party

or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Arthur Miller was subpoenaed by the US government

to appear before HUAC,

the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

In Hollywood, this was really ruining a lot of careers

by forcing people to name names

of their fellow communist or communist sympathisers

that they had known or knew.

Are you a member of the Communist Party,

have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

Are you a member of the Communist Party?

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

She anxiously waits, even as he refuses to name names.

The story about Arthur Miller's defiance

is usually told in terms of his political courage,

and Marilyn is there standing by her man.

According to people who knew both Miller and Marilyn at the time,

it was Marilyn who urged Miller to stand up to them.

She hated McCarthyism and everything that it stood for.

We need to really think about it as somebody who has principles

and who is making her own statement

about a very toxic political and cultural climate.

Emerging from the hearing, Miller shocks the press.

Mr Miller, why did you fill out an application for a passport?

I wanted to go to England.

For what reason?

You guess. We'd like you to...

I wanted to be with the woman who is going to be my wife.

You mean Marilyn Monroe? That's correct.

He hadn't asked her to marry him.

She was a little taken aback... hearing that announcement!

It's hard to not see it as somewhat cynical

given the pressures that he was under at the time

and Marilyn's status as America's sweetheart.

Maybe Arthur was using his relationship with Marilyn

as a way to whitewash himself.

Before Marilyn has time to take it in,

the press descends on her Manhattan apartment.

Have you been engaged long? No, just a few days.

You see her against the wall, and she looks so fragile and flustered.

Yes, she's someone who knows how to work the press

but you can still see the cracks of, "This is really overwhelming,

"and I'm trying to make sense of this huge change in my life."

When are you planning to have some children?

Well, I'm not married yet, dear.

Only two weeks later, Marilyn and Arthur are married.

She wore my wedding veil,

and...what I did, my veil was white,

so I dumped it in tea -

and she loved it.

She thought she was getting the final thing she wanted

which was a complete and happy family -

but she doesn't realise that she's heading into a storm,

that's what's coming next.

NEWSREEL: "She's here," said the headlines

and everyone knew they meant the American film star

with the famous shape and the wiggly walk.

Marilyn arrives in England

to produce and star in her production company's first film.

The Prince And The Showgirl was going to finally demonstrate

everything that she had been fighting for, for a decade,

that she was going to get all of that credibility that she wanted.

Who was more credible than Sir Laurence Olivier?

I said I would only do it with him. I would only consider doing it...

Why? Because I would go to see Sir Laurence and myself in a movie!

THEY LAUGH

He had theatrical respectability and the reputation of a great actor.

She was a household name.

They're opposites who are going to get together to make a whole.

In the romantic comedy, Marilyn plays an American showgirl

opposite Olivier's European prince.

Olivier also directs.

It's just my stage name, Elsie Marina. My dad was a Marine, see?

My real name is Elsie Stoltzenberg.

Indeed.

In the beginning, obviously, she was nervous,

needs time to settle in with not only the crew, but with the cast.

Marilyn had come into Olivier's territory, in every sense.

There's a big age difference between them,

and he just quite blatantly does not see her as a creative equal.

Turned quite warm all of a sudden, hasn't it?

I wasn't addressed.

Give me the ambassador...

As a method actor, Marilyn insists

on real caviar and real Champagne for every take...

She didn't want to be an automatic, you know, "Roll 'em!"

and she does the scene. She wanted to have a motivation.

Yes, yes, my dear fellow, you can speak freely. There's no-one here.

..but Olivier derides her techniques.

..Un-Carpathian activities... SNIGGERS

He told her to stop thinking and just to be sexy.

It was like he was being a British Zanuck.

Pushed her right back to where she had started from.

I imagine for her it was very frustrating and heartbreaking

to have to deal with someone's scorn

when you were hoping they could support you in the role.

He is treating this woman, 30 years old,

in charge of her own company, as a child.

And she responds in kind.

She said that she started being bad with him.

And what that meant was that she was late, and she was obstructive.

She was a pain.

She knew exactly what she was doing.

It was how she could push back against them.

One day, we waited for a very long time

and Sir Laurence made her apologise to the whole crew

for keeping them waiting so long.

Excuse me.

But once she was in front of the camera, she was magic.

Say, listen, I could use a short one.

I need it for my heart. It's kind of beating down here.

I'm so sorry. It's all right. It's not your fault.

In fact, if I'd known this was all that was going to happen,

I wouldn't even have been nervous.

Long life to your Grand Highness!

Cheerio.

Better luck next time, only not with me, of course.

When you watch the movie, I think she's much better than he is in it.

I think he comes off stilted, and she is always luminous.

Say, listen. There is something to this stuff.

Are you sure there's no effect when you drink it that way?

She upstages him into the heavens.

It's one of her loveliest, sweetest, most effective performances,

and she steals it from him.

I think you have had enough.

I think so, too.

Behind the scenes, the conflict with Olivier

is splintering Marilyn's relationship

with her friend and co-producer Milton Greene.

He would get up every day go to Pinewood, and be a producer -

which meant calm everybody, make sure everybody shows up.

It's a thankless job.

Milton found himself at times siding with Olivier,

or at least feeling sympathy for Olivier.

Marilyn then started to think,

"Well, he must be on Olivier's side."

By this point, Marilyn was also having trouble sleeping.

She took a lot of sleeping pills every night.

When you're filming, you have to be wide-eyed

and you have to look fresh.

And if you haven't slept, you're not going to.

So everybody in Hollywood takes pills.

And once she starts taking the pills, she can't stop.

ADVERT: If even counting sheep can't help you to sleep

then Sominex brings 100% safe sleep.

During the '50s into the '60s, there's this ramping up

of prescribing medication to deal with psychological problems.

VOICE ECHOES: Control yourself...

Women were definitely medicated in ways that men were not.

ADVERT: If you're a woman, you know what it means to be needed.

Those women were tormented in a lot of ways,

and they were not really able to show their whole authentic self

which created in them secrets.

All the fun can go out of your life.

So it's no surprise that people would become addicted.

Not a surprise!

All of the stories about The Prince And The Showgirl

focus on Marilyn's difficulties

and the difficulty of her very toxic relationship with Olivier.

Clearly, her addictions were a problem for her and for the set -

but she wasn't incapacitated.

People who worked with her

spoke about the smart notes that she would give

after watching the dailies

where she said very specific things that she wasn't happy with, and why.

They were emblematic of a woman who knew her craft

and knew exactly what she wanted and exactly what she needed.

Before she finishes filming,

Marilyn comes face-to-face with real royalty...

..but behind the smiles,

she fears the worst for her production company.

During the making of Prince And The Showgirl,

things were not going well for the production company

or for the partners.

When Marilyn views the first cut of the film,

she thinks it's slow and tedious.

She blames co-producer Milton Greene.

She decided she was going to take control of the production herself.

She didn't know what to do with Milton. She loved him,

but she didn't know what to do with him. She was embarrassed.

Marilyn had one last meeting with Milton Greene

and it was heartbreaking. They were both sobbing.

It was very disheartening for him

because he thought they were going to make wonderful movies together.

These two human beings loved movies.

When the film premieres in New York, Milton is nowhere to be seen.

It was over.

We had a life to live.

Marilyn was, as her story always shows,

pretty clearly somebody who looked forward rather than back.

In the summer of 1957, Marilyn's only concern is her family.

She embraced her marriage in a way that she'd never done before.

My father Sam was shooting a lot during that period.

When they were in Amagansett, those photographs

of Marilyn on the beach... Very playful.

She adored him.

She discovers that she's pregnant, and she is ecstatic about it.

She wanted to be a mom. I think she wanted to love a baby.

I think she wanted to move forward with her life

out of just being this poster girl

and being a woman who chooses to be a mother, chooses a family.

She loved children. I mean, the way she treated us,

I think she would have been a great mother.

But on August 1st 1957,

Marilyn collapses and is rushed to a Manhattan hospital.

She'd not only lost her baby, she almost lost her own life.

She's released from the hospital

to a whole battery of reporters and media.

She was very, very ill indeed.

And yet she somehow had to turn it on for the cameras.

There is something so predatory-feeling about paparazzi.

She was that famous that you would expect that attention,

but it's still really sad it had to be there in her darkest moments.

It is just so heartbreaking to see someone

who's really trying to put on a brave face

with this tremendously painful moment

that leads her to feel like a failure...

..because in the 1950s you were still considered

to be not fully fulfilled unless you had a child.

On the heels of her loss, Marilyn faces another struggle.

They needed money, so it was time for her to return to work.

Taking time out from a high-profile career remains risky today,

and it was even riskier in the '50s.

There was always the chance that her popularity

was going to pass her by, that she would hit an expiration date.

In March 1958, an intriguing new project lands on Marilyn's desk.

She absolutely knew a good script when she read one

and particularly a very funny script.

She had a sense of what was going to be box office gold

and she knew that she could perform that role.

Some Like It Hot

remains one of her finest performances.

# Running wild, lost control

# Running wild, mighty bold... #

Anyone can play a ditz but to play one that you love...

# All the time, never blue... #

..that, to me, takes a talent that cannot be taught,

and she had that in spades.

# Don't love nobody... #

There was no-one else like her.

And the moment you put her in front of the camera,

it's like watching magic.

# Running wild! #

Next, on the final episode of Reframed: Marilyn Monroe...

She does not feel seen or understood by her husband,

the person who's supposed to know her best.

In the middle of production, Marilyn takes off to New York.

She had a date with the President.

# Happy birthday, Mr President... #

I think she was playing with him, but it was certainly brave.

Marilyn said, you know,

"Splish-splash, this would make some interesting pictures."

Stripping down and being absolutely naked,

it's really pushing the envelope.