Ranking the onscreen portrayals of Marilyn Monroe

Headlining this schlocky, tawdry and cheaply made early stab at a highly fictionalized Monroe “biopic,” Rowe—an otherwise reliable light comedy actress specializing in sunny/ditzy/sexy blondes who’s best remembered for her two-decade stint on Hee-Haw—enjoys a rare, let’s-be-charitable-and-call-it-dramatic role. Rowe’s out of her depth even in such threadbare, shamelessly exploitative material, and does little to even superficially evoke Monroe’s persona, on screen or off; notwithstanding the similar hourglass figure, this performance is utterly flat.

In a lavishly produced dream sequence for Gossip Girl’s 100^th episode, Lively’s character Serena van der Woodsen projects herself into the eternally iconic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” musical sequence from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lively ably masters lip-syncing to Monroe’s vocal track and nailing all the hip-shimmying choreography … and that’s about it. She gamely delivers a fond tribute to Monroe, but doesn’t make a strong case for a more ambitious follow-up opportunity to channel the star.

In a relatively brief and underdeveloped turn in the miniseries chronicling the rise and fall of the ill-fated Kennedy brothers, Sullivan, an accomplished Canadian actress with numerous TV credits, delivers on old-school movie star glamour, but lacks the distinctive spark to truly conjure a fully formed Monroe. She neither leans into the familiar iconography nor makes the role her own, leaving scenes such as Marilyn’s overt attempts to seduce Bobby Kennedy (a terrific Barry Pepper) to fizzle when they should sizzle.

This offbeat film adaptation of Terry Johnson’s play imagined an evening that brought together a surprisingly physics-savvy version of Monroe—or, more specific to the script, “The Actress”—with the Albert Einstein-ian “Professor” (Michael Emil). Although she had the advantage of eschewing the need for genuine authenticity by playing an alt-history take for frequent collaborator Nicolas Roeg, Russell’s really only playing a pop culture shorthand version of the screen legend, all signature coos, platinum locks and billowy white dress. Under those trappings, she remains too distinctively Theresa Russell to be subsumed by Monroe—though it should be noted that too much Theresa Russell is rarely a bad thing.

It’s difficult to think of two actresses further apart in screen allure than sultry, innocent-yet-available blonde Monroe and the cool, intellect-driven redhead Anderson, yet the latter manages to tap something of the essence of Marilyn, fused with her American Gods role Media, the new deity personifying popular mass communication. Drawing from the stereotypical but indelible tropes springing from The Seven Year Itch and the conspiratorial mythos that proliferated after Monroe’s death, Anderson—who always delivers the unexpected, from The X-Files to The Crown to The Great—layers on an otherworldly, mysterioso topspin befitting Media’s metaphysical origins to eerie, and amusing, effect.

With her 1985 music video for “Material Girl,” one of the finest homages to Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” performance as well as a canny commentary on her own era’s excessive materialism, Madonna unabashedly underlined her connection to Marilyn, reimagined as an empowered, sex-positive female icon for a new era. So it was no surprise that during her first stint guesting on SNL that same year she was tapped to play Monroe; though her impression was pretty wan, she at least had Randy Quaid as JFK and Robert Downey, Jr. as Elvis to liven up a downright wackadoo sketch; much improved was her return stint as Monroe in a 1993, singing a seductively baby-voiced “Happy Inauguration, Mr. President” to then-newly elected commander-in-chief Bill Clinton (Phil Hartman), much to his delight—and to the displeasure of his first lady, Hilary Clinton (Jan Hooks).

While none of the three actresses playing the performers cast in Smash’s Marilyn-inspired Broadway-show-within-the-show “Bombshell” were given the opportunity to truly deep-dive into Monroe’s persona, each found distinctive ways into the icon via Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman’s songs. As a non-Broadway belter, Thurman—as a Hollywood star drafted into the role to boost the production’s profile—delivered a soft and sensual shrewdness to Marilyn’s evolution into Method actor through “Dig Deep.” Better suited to the ladder-climbing Norma Jean aspect with her brassy vocals, McPhee captured the ambition, hope and ego in numbers like “Let Me Be Your Star.” But it was the versatilely voiced stage sensation Hilty who delivered the most fully rounded, knowing takes on Marilyn, channeling her savvy sense of own allure in “National Pastime,” the increasingly mechanical, soul-stifling nature of selling her sex appeal in “Let’s Be Bad” and the show-stopping and encapsulating her dream of cultural immortality in the show-stopping “Don’t Forget Me.”

Griffiths’ take on the ultimate screen goddess certainly stuck a chord with Hollywood: a professional Monroe lookalike, she’s been cast as the actress (or a version thereof) multiple times, including in the TV series Growing Pains, Dark Skies, Cybil, Timecop, The Strip, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Nip/Tuck, and, perhaps most memorably, as the Marilyn-themed waitress at Jackrabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction. Griffiths got her chance to most deeply immerse herself in the role in an otherwise by-the-numbers TV-movie inspired by Marilyn superfan Robert Slatzer’s unsupported, unconvincing malarky in which he claimed to have been romantically involved—even briefly married!—to Monroe, and, of course, supposedly helped steer the early career movies that launched her superstardom. Owing primarily to her well-cultivated physical resemblance to the icon, Griffiths is mostly passable in this weakly written, cheaply produced telepic, but fares slightly better in another more extended stint as Marilyn: a 1993 episode of Quantum Leap, “Goodbye, Norma Jean” as Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) tried to unravel the mystery of Monroe’s final days.

Although neither as thematically harrowing or inventively if luridly stylized as the 2022 Netflix film based but derived from the same source material, the heavily fictionalized novel by Joyce Carol Oates, this two-part miniseries similarly features a Monroe seemingly with little personal agency, self-reflection or humor, constantly shaped and buffeted by the whims of others and frequently victimized at the hands of the male-dominated Hollywood power structure. In some ways, Montgomery, always a capable performer (Without a Trace, Unforgettable), is a keen choice for this interpretation: she resists attempting imitation and risking caricature, yet she never puts a distinctive enough stamp on Monroe to make her feel fully alive, either. The result is something of a cipher—which may or may not be the point of the whole exercise.

Walking an opposite path than that trod by Blonde, this Lifetime miniseries centers around a Marilyn Monroe that is almost preternaturally hyperaware of her existence and its freighted meaning, even when she’s supposed to be falling apart. A generally underrated actress (Lars and the Real Girl, Pan Am) in an overlooked turn, Garner elevates this overwritten, well-worn material with her endearing take on Monroe, keeping its always-articulated self-reflection, often bordering on the annoying, at arm’s length through a thoughtful, well-fleshed out performance full of wit, charm and vulnerability. A different type of bombshell than Monroe, Garner emanates a distinctive allure and screen presence, but subtly morphs it into something akin to Monroe’s without treading into mimicry.

Hear us out: no, Mansfield isn’t playing a formal take on Monroe, whose popularity paved the way for Mansfield’s own success in Hollywood. But she’s certainly delivering a winking satire of her fellow bombshell’s public image, down to those sexually charged squeals, exactly at the moment that Marilyn dominated the real-world zeitgeist. Indeed, everything about Mansfield’s Rita Marlowe is more Marilyn than Marilyn: a shrewder career player, a more irresistible, aggressive maneater, more layered with vapid Hollywood artifice, twice as platinum blonde and with even more staggering curves. And in the end, she’s just a good-hearted vulnerable woman looking for real love. Perfectly capturing a portrait of a screen sex siren in excess—an image that Mansfield calculatedly cultivated but, sadly, was never able to transcend herself—the actress earned a special spot in the annals of those who played Monroe.

The film, which views the screen icon as a fractured personality in explicitly literal terms, casts Judd—just stepping into her movie star status—as the striving starlet Norma Jean, driven to succeed as any cost (opposite Mira Sorvino as her Hollywood incarnation). The actress delivers on girl-next-door-but-more-glamourous packaging with the grit and determination of a steel-backboned survivor. Judd’s Norma Jean takes no prisoners, often coming off more strident, demanding and entitled than one suspects the real proto-Monroe might have been, but that’s by design; after she’s physically supplanted by Sorvino’s more wounded, splintering screen goddess, Norma Jean sticks around metaphysically as a devil on Marilyn’s shoulder, tormenting her whenever she threatens to veer off the path to bigger, greater, more. That is, except in moments where Norma Jean actually feels Marilyn’s pain and offers empathy and comfort, allowing Judd—who earned Golden Globe and Emmy nominations—to show even greater range in a role already tricky to navigate.

In one of the first TV-movie attempts to try to accurately depict Monroe’s increasingly legendary history, Hicks—later an accomplished actress best known for Seventh Heaven and her winning genre turns in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Child’s Play—delivers a career-making performance that’s the bedrock foundation for the whole effort. Hicks’ portrayal evokes a wealth of Monroe’s many key facets, notably her knowing wit, the warm, winsome charm that instantly aligned people with her and the darks shadows that always lurked beneath the glossy, inviting surface—she’s a Marilyn to root for, not to pity or sneer at. Hicks was Emmy-nominated for her efforts, somehow capturing the essence of Monroe’s movie star mannerisms while still infusing the role with relatable humanity.

In a dubiously fictionalized narrative that reconceives Monroe’s life and career trajectory into a ceaseless series of marginalizations, humiliations and degradations at the hands not just of Hollywood but a long series of men and women using her for their ends, de Armas delivers one of the most brave and unflinching interpretations of Marilyn yet committed to the screen. Rising above writer-director Andrew Dominik’s almost cartoonishly stylized and relentlessly punishing interpretation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, de Armas gives herself over seemingly body and soul to summon Marilyn’s spirit in a startling transformation, finding that elusive path between the actress’ oh-so-familiar iconography and believable flesh-and-bone character. She fully embodies a Marilyn paying the price of fame while navigating a Hollywood hellscape, even as the film, in its focus on victimization, denies any sense of Monroe’s own agency, ambition, wit and self-possession—it’s Symbolic Marilyn, serving a thematic agenda. But even within the confines of the material, de Armas’ delivers something transcendent in her commitment.

Other than Williams, no performer has better evoked both the magnetic, alluring spell that Monroe exerted on anyone who entered her orbit and the maddeningly mercurial, achingly insecure nature that so often vexed intimates and acquaintances alike. Coming into her own as a major screen actress and bona fide movie star, she delivers a tour de force turn, electrifying an otherwise minor episode in the icon’s life and career. The story is based on the memoirs of British filmmaker Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) who befriended and enjoyed a flirtation with Monroe during his early career break working on her 1957 romantic comedy The Prince And The Showgirl with exacting co-star/director Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh, in top form). One part Little Girl Lost, one part Been Around the Block, Williams’ Oscar-nominated performance brims with empathy and understanding, particularly about how Monroe was frequently at the mercy of the powerful aura of her stardom and the potent desire she provoked, yet also able to turn those qualities to her advantage—even weaponize them—when she chose to do so.