Marilyn Monroe at 100, CBS revisits the star's enduring legacy

Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday has reopened the case on how Norma Jeane Mortenson became one of Hollywood’s most durable symbols. The clearest record still comes from the weeks after her death, when CBS News aired a retrospective special on Aug. 10, 1962, six days after Monroe died at 36 and one day after her body was found in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

That program, listed in archival material as Marilyn Monroe: Why?, brought together people who knew her as a wife, colleague, student and studio fixture rather than as a poster image. Joe DiMaggio appeared alongside Kim Novak, Actors Studio director Lee Strasberg, playwright Clifford Odets, and directors George Cukor and Jean Negulesco. Their testimony captured a woman whose public myth had already overtaken the working actress behind 29 films made between 1946 and 1961.

Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles, California. She would later be baptized Norma Jeane Baker and spend much of her childhood in foster homes before a modeling career led to a film contract in 1946. By the 1950s and early 1960s, she had become one of Hollywood’s most popular stars, a major sex symbol whose fame stretched far beyond her movie roles. But the CBS special suggested that her image was built as much by the people around her as by the studio system that sold her.

That tension matters more at the centennial because Monroe’s legacy has never rested on film credits alone. The 2026 anniversary, which fell on June 1, was marked by public tributes, photo releases and Hollywood-area commemorations that underscored how her face, name and story continue to circulate six decades after her death. The lasting fascination is not just with Monroe the icon, but with the distance between that icon and the woman seen by colleagues, mentors and friends.

From the beginning, the record shows a career compressed into a brief span and a life cut short at 36. Yet the surviving footage, interviews and tributes keep returning to the same question: how much of Marilyn Monroe was performance, and how much was imposed by others? At 100, that question remains the center of her enduring legacy.