The Jews who made Marilyn Monroe into an icon

Then there’s Weegee’s distorted versions, Danny Lyon’s shot of her poster on an abandoned building and Robert Frank’s document of the day after she died, capturing his son reading a newspaper on a Cape Cod beach with a screaming headline, “Marilyn Dead”.

Marilyn Monroe, pictured in1946, by André De Dienes (Credit: André De Dienes)MUUS Collection. Marilyn Monroe

“It was remarkable that this all-time American icon has been made by European and Jewish photographers,” says the show’s curator, Rosie Broadley, who is also the gallery’s joint head of curatorial and senior curator of 20th-century collections.

“It’s about timing. Just as Marilyn was coming into work as a model, these photographers were setting up their studios. There is an interesting sense of joint ambition to succeed that she shares with them.”

American photojournalist Lawrence Schiller agreed. He and Monroe bonded over their shared Jewishness when he snapped her on the set of her unfinished film Something’s Got to Give for Paris Match. “The photographers who related to her and stayed in touch with her were the Jewish photographers,” he told me.

“A lot came out of a sense of shared oppression and there was an extra moment and unspoken heritage,” he said.

After all, Monroe had converted to Judaism after marrying Arthur Miller on July 1, 1956 with a Jewish ceremony under a chupah. After her marriage Monroe studied with a rabbi, and she continued to identify as Jewish after she and Miller divorced. “She was obviously searching for and interested in finding a spiritual life that made sense to her and made sense of her life,” says Broadley.

Milton H. Greene. Marilyn Monroe

“She wanted to be part of that [Jewish life] and when you don’t have much of a home and a background that’s a community,” she adds.

According to 89-year-old Schiller, his shot of Marilyn swimming naked in the pool in the show was her idea. “She knew what she wanted. She knew that if she took off her clothes, the pictures would be all over the world,” he says, suggesting that she wanted to knock Elizabeth Taylor – another Jewish convert – off the magazine covers.

So, while “she would giggle and smile,” she was a smart businesswoman, he recalls from his Los Angeles office.

Schiller got his shot as he “had two or three cameras around my neck,” he says. “I wasn’t snapping all the time. I was watching carefully and picking my moments.” He remembers “following her, you know, like a puppy dog with my camera” and snapped that shot “because she was like a little child playing in the water, and that looked good”.

The exhibition is organised thematically, according to the star’s collaborations with certain photographers.

Nine out of the 12 are Jewish, including Sam Shaw, whose shots of Monroe included the one of her white dress flying up over a New York subway grate for The Seven Year Itch.

[Missing Credit]

A Jewish photographer, Philippe Halsman, kicks off the exhibition with his playful images including Marilyn working out, doing a handstand and jumping. “His relationship with her begins right at the beginning of her career in the late 1940s and then he photographs her in the late 1950s,” says Broadley. Born in Riga in 1916, Halsman had a fraught early life. He was wrongly accused of killing his father on a hiking trip in the Austrian Tyrol in 1928.

[Missing Credit]

He was initially jailed for ten years but his sentence was reduced to four years after an outcry accusing the authorities of antisemitism, and he was pardoned by the Austrian president, Wilhelm Miklas, in October 1930. Halsman moved to Paris and began taking photos, opening a studio in Montparnasse in 1934 where he became the go-to portrait photographer for the cultural glitterati, including Marc Chagall and André Gide. When France was invaded by Germany in 1940, he fled to the US, with help from family friend Albert Einstein.

Norma Jean 1946 by Bruno Bernard, one of the earliest photographers to spot Monroe's star quality (Credit: Bruno Bernard)Bernard of Hollywood Foundation.

Bruno Bernard, aka Bernard of Hollywood, has his own room in the show as the man who discovered Monroe, says Broadley. He “spotted her in the street and invited her to sit for him” at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs, California in 1947. His candid pin-up style that led to his nickname, the King of Glamour, added va va voom to her early fresh-faced image. Born in Berlin in 1912 as Bruno Bernard Sommerfeld, he fled to Berkeley in California in 1937 after his name appeared on a Gestapo hit list as he was general secretary of a Jewish youth group. He returned to Berlin in the 1960s, working as a photojournalist, and covered the 1961 Eichmann trial in Israel for the German magazine Der Spiegel.

This portrait of Monroe was taken by Sam Shaw. Born Samuel Joseph Warshawsky he was close to Marilyn and made sure she and Arthur Miller had a Jewish wedding. Monroe said of Shaw: 'He always makes me look good'[Missing Credit]

The photographers created this trusted bond with Monroe as “they all seemed to have responded to her vulnerability,” says London-based Jewish photographer Jillian Edelstein, whose portraits will be on show at Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh from July 31 to October 24. Four of the six photographers displaying their behind-the-scenes shots from the set of Monroe’s last finished film, The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller, are Jewish too. Take Eve Arnold and Elliott Erwitt, who captured the famous group shot of Monroe with co-stars Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, Miller, director John Huston and producer Frank E Taylor, posing against props and perched on stools.

The Misfits photos show a different side of Monroe, says Broadley. They are “more gritty, more raw, more vulnerable, less curated [by Monroe]”. For example, Arnold’s shot of the actress and Clift shows Monroe exhausted between another retake of their long five-minute scene together.

A story about three disillusioned cowboys who meet a new divorcee, played by Monroe, who falls for one of them, The Misfits is being re-released across UK and Irish cinemas this summer and as part of the BFI Southbank’s season of her films until July 31, Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star.

National Gallery of Art, Washing

Some of the Jewish photographers became close friends of hers. Milton H. Greene became her business partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions so “he was important beyond the images”, says Broadley.

For Broadley, Greene was the photographer who changed her image the most, developing her “sheeny, glamorous, supremely blonde [look] which in terms of her career are the moments that change her”. Think of 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Indeed, Greene’s photograph of Monroe in a white tutu dress “is pretty much one of the best-known photographs of Monroe,” says the curator.

Brooklyn-born Ed Feingersh took the most candid shots of Monroe in the show, says Broadley, when he followed her around New York for a week in 1955 for Redbook magazine. Taken without a flash, the down-to-earth images see her applying Chanel No. 5 perfume and taking the subway at Grand Central Station. Feingersh “spent an extended period of time with her, which means that you get a lot of shades of emotion, you get the joy, you get the contemplative moments, you get the quiet moments, so there’s this beautiful range that he’s captured,” she says. “You can feel the sense of her finding her way,” in the city and in pursuing a more serious acting career. t

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Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HE until September 6, 2026, npg.org.uk

Marilyn Monroe: Self Made Star is at BFI Southbank until July 31, whatson.bfi.org.uk

The Misfits is re-released by BFI Distribution and will be in cinemas across the UK through the summer, bfi.org.uk