June 1, 2026 marks what would have been Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday. If your knowledge of her stops at the white dress and the blonde hair, you’re missing the whole story. She was a businesswoman, a reader, an activist, and one of the most underpaid stars in Hollywood history. Gen Z talks a lot about systemic inequality and breaking boxes. Marilyn Monroe was doing all of that decades before it had a name.
Here is why you should know her.
She started with nothing
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles. Her mother, Gladys Baker, was institutionalised when Marilyn was young. She grew up in foster homes and an orphanage. She had no safety net, no family wealth, and no connections.
At 16, she got married to avoid returning to the orphanage. While her first husband served in the Merchant Marine during World War II, she worked in a munitions factory. A military photographer spotted her there and she began modelling. That was how it started.
She never graduated high school.
By the mid-1950s, she was the biggest movie star on the planet.
Also Read: Gen Z is worth $12 trillion, and Hollywood has no idea how to reach them
Hollywood loved her face and underpaid her badly
This is the part that hits different when you look at the numbers.
Marilyn Monroe was signed to a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Her weekly salary was capped at $1,500. In the 1953 film ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, she was the star. Her co-star Jane Russell was paid around $200,000 for the film. Monroe received approximately $18,000.
Same film. Same billing. Massively different pay.
The studio kept casting her in “dumb blonde” roles because those films made enormous amounts of money. Monroe knew it. She refused to accept it quietly.
When Fox offered her a film called ‘The Girl in Pink Tights’ without even showing her the script, she walked out. She left Hollywood entirely, moved to New York, and went on strike against the studio.
At the time, that kind of move was considered career suicide.
She built her own company before it was a thing
In 1955, Marilyn Monroe co-founded Marilyn Monroe Productions with photographer Milton Greene. This made her one of the first women in Hollywood history to own her own production company.
She used that leverage to negotiate an entirely new deal with Fox. The new contract gave her $100,000 per film, director approval, and subject approval. She went from $1,500 a week with zero creative control to having a seat at the table.
She produced ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’ through her own company in 1957, alongside British acting legend Laurence Olivier. By then, she was not just the star. She was a producer.
The girl-boss era Gen Z loves to reference? Marilyn Monroe was living it in 1955 without any of the cultural vocabulary we have now.
She was a serious student of acting
Hollywood sold her as effortless. The reality was the opposite.
Monroe enrolled at the Actors Studio in New York in 1955, studying under Lee Strasberg, one of the most respected acting teachers in American history. The Actors Studio trained people like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Al Pacino. Monroe was there because she wanted to be taken seriously as a performer.
She was. Strasberg later said she was one of the two most talented students he ever taught. The other was Marlon Brando.
Her performance in ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959) required 59 takes for a single scene involving a two-word line. Director Billy Wilder reportedly wanted to fire her. But when he watched the footage, he used the take he had. Critics called her performance one of the funniest in Hollywood history.
She was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy for that role and won.
She read more than most people realise
The “dumb blonde” image was a role. It was not the person.
Monroe owned a personal library of over 400 books. Her collection included works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Camus, and James Joyce. She read philosophy, poetry, psychology, and political theory.
She wrote poetry herself. And, she journaled extensively. Her notebooks were filled with questions about identity, existence, and what it meant to be seen by the world as one thing while being something entirely different inside.
Her third husband was playwright Arthur Miller, widely considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. He described her as perceptive and deeply thoughtful. They divorced in 1961, but the marriage itself was evidence that Monroe operated in intellectual spaces that her public image never reflected.
The IQ number of 168 that floats around the internet is not verified. No formal test record exists. But the library, the journals, the Actors Studio enrollment, and the people she surrounded herself with tell a clear story about who she actually was.
She used her platform for people who needed it
This is the part of her legacy that genuinely does not get enough attention.
Ella Fitzgerald was one of the greatest jazz singers who ever lived. In the 1950s, she was still being turned away from venues because she was Black. Monroe was a devoted fan of Fitzgerald’s music. When she learned that Fitzgerald could not get a booking at a prominent Los Angeles club, Monroe intervened directly.
She called the club owner and made a deal. If they booked Fitzgerald, Monroe would be at the front table every night she performed. The owner agreed. Monroe showed up. Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland came with her on the first night.
Fitzgerald’s career shifted substantially after those performances. In a 1972 interview, Fitzgerald said: “I owe Marilyn Monroe a real debt.”
Monroe also helped found the Hollywood chapter of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1960. She was vocal about nuclear disarmament at a time when that position drew real political scrutiny. She told a reporter: “My nightmare is the H-bomb. What’s yours?”
Monroe was also an alternate delegate to the Democratic caucus in Connecticut. She was politically engaged, not just politically adjacent.
She never got the recognition she deserved
Monroe appeared in 32 films over roughly a decade. She got nominations for two Golden Globes and two BAFTAs during her lifetime. And, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
She was never nominated for an Academy Award.
Not once.
Monroe historian Greg Schreiner put it plainly: “There’s a lot more depth to her performances than anybody back then gave her credit for.”
The Academy recognized glamour. They were not ready to recognize Marilyn Monroe as a serious actress, which is exactly what she was.
What she left behind
Marilyn Monroe died on August 4, 1962. She was 36 years old. The official cause was a barbiturate overdose. She had been dealing with mental health struggles, prescription medication dependency, and chronic insomnia for years. Hollywood did not protect her.
Her second husband, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, placed fresh red roses at her crypt three times a week for twenty years after her death.
She has been referenced, sampled, quoted, reimagined, and discussed continuously for over six decades since. Her image appears in fine art, in fashion, in music videos, and in memes. She remains one of the most searched cultural figures in internet history.
But the real Marilyn Monroe, the one who went on strike against a studio, who owned her own production company, who built Ella Fitzgerald’s career with a single phone call, who read Dostoevsky between takes, who wrote poetry in notebooks nobody was supposed to read, that person deserves to be known.
She would have been 100. She still has things to teach.