Ranking the onscreen portrayals of Marilyn Monroe

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.