Marilyn Monroe’s 5 Best Movie Performances

Reported by Vogue.

More than six decades after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognized faces in the world — and one of the most misunderstood performers in Hollywood history. The iconography is so total, so overpowering, that it swallowed the actress whole. Film historian and Brooklyn College professor Foster Hirsch puts it plainly: a student once told him she was shocked to learn Monroe was an actress at all. "I thought she was just famous," the student said. According to Vogue, Hirsch has spent considerable time correcting exactly that assumption.

The reality, visible across Monroe's roughly 30 films in 15 years, is of a performer with razor-sharp comic instincts, genuine emotional depth, and an almost uncanny ability to make the most calculated image look effortless. Critics rarely gave her the credit. Audiences showed up for the spectacle of her — the platinum hair, the breathy voice, the body — and the studio at 20th Century Fox was happy to keep it that way, engineering a persona that was sexy but safe, desirable but never threatening. What got buried underneath was actual craft.

The Performances That Prove It

Hirsch points to Niagara (1953) as the road not taken — Monroe as a genuinely dangerous femme fatale, lethal and knowing, a version Fox immediately shelved in favor of something more palatable. How to Marry a Millionaire that same year cemented the template: dizzy, warm, shrewdly nonthreatening. By The Seven Year Itch (1955), she had refined it into something almost mythological — Hirsch describes a repertory screening where Monroe's first appearance drew a collective sigh from the audience, an involuntary exhale of recognition and pleasure. The scene works entirely because Monroe plays The Girl as innocent of her own power. A more knowing actress would've collapsed it.

The later work complicates the myth further. Bus Stop (1956), made after Monroe trained with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio, draws on genuine Method interiority — though Hirsch argues she was already doing it instinctively in 1952's Don't Bother to Knock. Costar Don Murray reportedly endured 40-plus takes per shot; Monroe was chronically late, seemingly unprepared. And yet the performance is, in Hirsch's words, Oscar-nominee-worthy. Some Like It Hot (1959) is widely considered her finest film, though he reserves a particular fascination for The Misfits, where something rawer and stranger bleeds through the performance — her personal anguish surfacing through the character's, or maybe instead of it.

Film Forum's centennial retrospective Marilyn 100 runs May 29 through June 11 and offers the chance to watch all of this unfold on a proper screen. What you'll see isn't a star coasting on beauty — it's a woman doing serious technical work to sustain an image the world demanded of her, take after difficult take.

Playing the version of yourself everyone wants to see, convincingly, for 15 years — that's not just fame. That's a performance.

Read the original at Vogue.