There isn't enough upper lip between the end of your nose and your mouth.
Emmeline Snively to Norma Jeane Dougherty

I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures. She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson, when a movie star had to look beautiful, and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow.
Leon Shamroy, on MM's 1946 screen test

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Marilyn's insecurities nearly screamed out of her. If she had an eight o'clock date, I had to be there at noon to start on her. If I was two minutes late she was furious, though she thought nothing of keeping others waiting for hours or days.
George Masters

This is a little kid who wants to be with the other little kids sucking lollipops and watching the rollercoaster, but she can't because they won't let her. She's frightened to death of that public which thinks she is so sexy. My God, if they only knew.
Allan "Whitey" Snyder

She was not the usual movie idol. There was something democratic about her. She was the type who would join in and wash up the supper dishes even if you didn't ask her.
Carl Sandburg

We were in mid-flight, and there was a nut on the plane.
Billy Wilder on MM and the shooting of Some Like It Hot

I took her as a serious actress before I ever met her. I think she's an a great comedienne, but I also think that she might turn into the greatest tragic actress that can be imagined.
Arthur Miller

'Marilyn was an incredible person to act with ... the most marvelous I ever worked with, and I have been working for 29 years.
Montgomery Clift



This whole thing about her feeling she has to get married and have children and be normal and well adjusted- I blame it on psychoanalysis.
Norman Mailer

There's a broad with her future behind her
Constance Bennett

When she's there, she's there. All of her is there! She's there to work.
Clark Gable

It was like being sucked into a vacuum.
Tommy Noonan on kissing MM in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

She looked like, if you bit her, milk and honey would flow from her.
Artist Franz Kline

Still she hangs like a bat in the heads of the men who met her, and none of us will ever forget her.
Sammy Davis, Jr.

Marilyn's need to be desired was so great that she could make love to a camera. Because of this, her lust aroused lust in audiences, sometimes even among women. There was nothing subtle about it. She was no tease. She was prepared, and even eager, to give what she offered.
William Manchester

She walks like a young antelope, and when she stands up it's like a snake uncoiling. Jerry Wald on early MM

She comes out of the dressing room Norma Jeane. When she stepped in front of the camera, she was Marilyn.
Lawrence Schiller

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Marilyn played the best game with the worst hand of anybody I know.
Edward Wagenknecht

Marilyn Monroe is not a raving beauty, and her legs are too short for the rest of her. Laurence Willinger

She was among the least 'naturally' sexy or beautiful women I've ever worked on. Ann-Margret, Jennifer Jones, Cyd Charisse, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, without make-up I could name dozens who are more naturally sexy and beautiful than Marilyn Monroe was.
George Masters

Marilyn is a dreamy girl. She's the kind who's liable to show up with one red shoe and one black shoe.
Jane Russell

That girl really has something. She looks like a new model Lana Turner.
Producer Frank King to Sidney Skolsky, 1951

Miss Monroe is one of the greatest comedy actresses of our time. She is simply superb. Miss Mansfield I've never seen.
Vladimir Nabokov, when asked his opinion of America's sex symbols

It was impossible to think of Marilyn Monroe except as Cinderella.
Diana Trilling

One of the most unappreciated people in the world.
Joshua Logan

The trouble with Marilyn was she didn't trust her own judgment, always had someone around to depend on. Coaches, so-called friends. Even me.
Allan 'Whitey' Snyder



She's scared and unsure of herself. I found myself wishing that I were a psychoanalyst and she were my patient. It might be that I couldn't have helped her, but she would have looked lovelv on a couch.
Billy Wilder

Hollywood, Broadway, the night clubs all produce their quota of sex queens, but the public takes them or leaves them; the world is not as enslaved by them as it was by Marilyn Monroe, because none but she could suggest such a purity of sexual delight. Diana Trilling

I asked her where she lived, and when she said at the Studio Club, I was impressed because I knew that a girl who looked like that could have the biggest house in Beverly Hills, she could have whatever she wanted because men would give it to her. Therefore, if she lived at the Studio Club it was because she had character.
Ben Lyon on his 1946 meeting with Norma Jeane Dougherty

I have great faith that her career would have continued. She was one of the greatest draws in the history of motion pictures, and today I think she would have been tops. Marilyn had a childlike quality which made men adore her. Yet women weren't jealous. Like John Wayne and a few other giants, she had a star quality that had nothing to do with acting. . . . What women in pictures can compare with her today? Nobody.
Ben Lyon

Marilyn is a moonwalker. When she used to live in my house, I often felt like she was a somnambulist walking around.
Natasha Lytess

She'd come out of our apartment in a shleppy old coat, looking like my maid, and all the people would push her aside to get my autograph. She loved it.
Shelley Winters



She would have been a very unfortunate woman, because she would have had to get a face lift and she'd have lost most of her beauty, I'm afraid. She would have continued to drink and would probably have not been very attractive anymore and trying to get character parts and not have been able to get them.
Earl Wilson on MM, if she had lived to grow old

Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display.
Cecil Beaton

I had always thought that all those amusing remarks she was supposed to have made for the press had probably been manufactured and mimeographed by her press agent, but they weren't. She was a very bright person, an instinctive type.
Photographer Elliott Erwitt

On the surface, she was still a happy girl. But those who criticized her never saw her as I did, crying like a baby because she often felt herself so inadequate.


Look at that face-she could be five years old.
Laurence Olivier

I did know her, and out of that sentiment for her, I could never talk about her for publication.
Marlon Brando

Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: 'How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?' Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can't believe that life wasn't important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere.
Marlon Brando

She had such magnetism that if 15 men were in a room with her, each man would be convinced he was the one she'd be waiting for after the others left.
Publicist Roy Craft

It's difficult to say what Marilyn's future would have been, but I believe her career would have continued, and she would have been an important actress. I never worked with her, but I think some of the people who did failed to give her the patience and consideration she needed. She had her problems. She was disturbed in many areas, and those who weren't close friends of hers may not have realized how grave some of her personal problems were.
Peter Lawford

She's worth all the trouble.
Joshua Logan to Laurence Olivier

You say hello to her or it's a nice day today, and she answers with a line from the script. She forgets everything but the work.
Jean Negulesco

It may sound peculiar to say so, because she is no longer with us, but we were very close. Once when we were doing that picture together, I got a call on the set: my younger daughter had had a fall. I ran home and the one person to call was Marilyn. She did an awful lot to boost things up for movies when everything was at a low state; there'll never be anyone like her for looks, for attitude, for all of it.
Betty Grable

She once got her life so balled up that the studio hired a full-time secretary maid for her. So Marilyn soon got the secretary as balled up as she was, and she ended up waiting on the secretary, instead of vice-versa.
Jane Russell

She can make any move, any gesture, almost insufferably suggestive.
Henry Hathaway

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It's no fun being married to an electric light.
Joe DiMaggio

Joe DiMaggio may not have made a good husband for Marilyn, but no one cared more for her. He was always, before the divorce, and after the divorce, her best friend.
Allan 'Whitey' Snyder

Marilyn wanted only herself to look like Marilyn Monroe. She wanted no one else to look anything like her and nothing or nobody to detract from her.
George Masters

I never worked with Marilyn Monroe, but if she'd lived, I think she would have been all right. She would have been President of the United States.
Walter Matthau



She represents to man something we all want in our unfulfilled dreams. She's the girl you'd like to double-cross your wife with. A man, he's got to be dead not to be excited by her.
Jean Negulesco

This [The Seven Year Itch] will be her last picture for anyone but 20th Century-Fox for three years and four months. She's under contract to this studio, and she'll fulfill it.
Darryl F. Zanuck on the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions

Gone was the shy, tense little girl voice, the slow groping for just the right word, the hesitation in answering a question . . . she came up, in a few minutes, with sprightlier conversation than most stars can manage in hours.
Dorothy Manning on the "new" Marilyn, circa 1956 "

[She was] so terrified she couldn't speak a word, just stood there mute but refusing to engage in the vacuous small talk.
Arthur Miller on early Marilyn Monroe

I don't think I ever saw two people so dizzy with love for each other. Having known Arthur a long time as an introspective guy, it was, well, like a miracle to see him so outgoing.
Jim Proctor

Marilyn Monroe's unique charisma was the force that caused distant men to think that if only a well-intentioned, understanding person like me could have known her, she would have been all right. In death, it has caused women who before resented her frolicsome sexuality to join in the unspoken plea she leaves behind - the simple, noble wish to be taken seriously.
Time magazine



She was a difficult woman, you know. We liked her and we said the nicest things about her and she deserved them; but, she was trouble and she brought that whole baggage of emotional difficulties of her childhood with her.
Norman Rosten

'Marilyn didn't use expressions like, 'being made love to,' she used a shorter, stronger word.
Earl Wilson

She knows the world, but this knowledge has not lowered her great and benevolent dignity, its darkness has not dimmed her goodness.
Edith Sitwell

She's one of the few stars who don't act as if she's made it. She does not coast. She worked harder in Let's Make Love than she did in Clash by Night. She's still the same person.
Jerry Wald

She could let herself look like an old bag for two weeks. She'd smell sometimes, and never comb her hair for weeks. That's why it would take nine hours to get her ready to re- create Marilyn Monroe.
George Masters

It can't be, it can't be, she couldn't have killed herself, she had three deals going.
A Hollywood agent

This atrocious death will be a terrible lesson for those whose principal occupation consists in spying on and tormenting the film stars.
Jean Cocteau

It had to happen. I didn't know when or how, but it was inevitable.
Arthur Miller

She will go on eternally.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis

In one sense, then, her life is completed, because her spirit is formed and has achieved itself. No matter what unpredictable events may be in her future, they cannot change who she is and what she has become.
Maurice Zolotow, 1960

She could have made it with a little luck.
Arthur Miller

She is a beautiful child. I don't think she's an actress at all, not in a traditional sense. What she has - this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence- could never surface on the stage. It's so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever, is mad. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that's wandering through her like a jailed spirit.
Constance Collier

I sat near her. She gulped wine by the glassful. When her name was called, she had to be helped out of her chair onto the stage. She accepted the award almost in a caricature of herself.
James Bacon on Marilyn Monroe at the 1962 Golden Globe Awards

I have the same problem as Marilyn. We attract people the way honey does bees, but they're generally the wrong kind of people. People who want something from us - if only our energy. We need a period of being alone to become ourselves.
Montgomery Clift

She seemed to have a kind of unconscious glow about her physical self that was innocent, like a child. When she posed nude, it was 'Gee, I arn kind of, you know, sort of dishy,' like she enjoyed it without being egotistical.
Elizabeth Taylor



She's really got an infection. It can't be psychological. It's a germ.
Peter Levathes to George Cukor, after MM failed to show up for the shooting of Something's Got to Give

The girl was an addict of sleeping tablets and she was made so by the goddam doctors.
John Huston

She was pure of heart. She was free of guile. She never understood either the adoration or the antagonism which she awakened.
Edward Wagenknecht

She stood for life. She radiated life. In her smile hope was always present. She glorified in life, and her death did not mar this final image. She had become a legend in her own time, and in her death, took her place among the myths of our century.
John Kobal

©-Copyright - Roar Skaug Larssen - 2000 - 2001