Marilyn Monroe's final interview, unseen LIFE photos published for centenary

Marilyn Monroe’s final interview and last formal photo shoot are being republished for the centenary of her birth, with a newly restored complete transcript and more than 400 Allan Grant photographs that were mostly never seen before. The release shifts Monroe away from the flattened icon of popular memory and toward a more self-aware woman speaking plainly about childhood, fame, the studio system, her work, celebrity and the burden of being a sex symbol.

The sessions took place in July 1962 at Monroe’s Brentwood home in Los Angeles, where LIFE sent writer Richard Meryman and photographer Allan Grant. Meryman conducted what became Monroe’s last interview, while Grant made the only formal photo shoot ever done at her new house. LIFE published Meryman’s article, headlined A Last Long Talk With a Lonely Girl, in its August 3, 1962 issue, and Monroe died two days later, on August 5, 1962, at age 36.

The new edition is being presented as a centenary project rather than a simple reprint. ACC Art Books says Marilyn Monroe 100 is the only official centenary publication and that it is being published in association with the Marilyn Monroe Estate. The book’s framing makes the commercial stakes clear: Monroe remains a powerful cultural asset more than six decades after her death, and the market still rewards material that promises something new about a life already exhaustively mythologized.

That newness rests not only in the photographs but in the transcript itself. In the restored interview, Monroe comes across as engaged and alert to the mechanics of her own image, speaking about the pressures of studio-made stardom and the distance between public fantasy and working reality. Simon & Schuster says the centenary book gathers work by 17 photographers who documented Monroe’s life and career from the Norma Jean years to the final shoot, reinforcing how carefully her image was built, circulated and revised.

For readers who think they know Marilyn Monroe, the release offers a tougher portrait: not just the blonde symbol that American culture turned into shorthand, but a working performer who understood how fame was manufactured and how costly it could be. The images and the interview together restore agency to the last chapter of her life, just as the centenary turns that chapter back into national memory.