Classic Film : Why do everyone hate Marilyn Monroe?

Everyone seems to hate her:

Billy Wilder: "Breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese"
"Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe; it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood"
My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?- on Marilyn Monroe
There was an actress named Marilyn Monroe. She was always late. She never remembered her lines. She was a pain in the ass. My Aunt Millie is a nice lady. If she were in pictures she would always be on time. She would know her lines. She would be nice. Why does everyone in Hollywood want to work with Marilyn Monroe and no one wants to work with my Aunt Millie? Because no one will go to the movies to watch my Aunt Millie.

Frank Capra: ""Breasts she had. And a wiggly figure. But to me sex is class, something more than a wiggly behind. If it weren't, I know 200 whores who would be stars"

John Huston: "Marilyn wasn't killed by Hollywood. The girl was an addict of sleeping tablets and she was made so by the goddamn doctors"

Otto Preminger: "She's a vacuum with nipples"

Tony Curtis: "he was a really mean person. During Some Like It Hot, she gave us a terrible time and when someone asked me then what it was like kissing her, I said, 'It's like kissing Hitler"

And there are many other celebs openly disliking her.

She must be the most hated star at Hollywood.

I think she deserved it (deserved the hate, not the death). She had no talent. Her look was overrated

Actress and dancer Mitzi Gaynor performed with Monroe in the 1954 movie musical "There's No Business Like Show Business," along with such seasoned musical comedy veterans as Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey and Donald O'Connor. Monroe was still basking in the glow of her sexy "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number from the film "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."

"I never saw anybody work so hard," noted Gaynor. But it wasn't an easy ride. "She did such a good job and personally, I think she stole the whole damn show. I just think she was thrown into a nest of vipers."

This is not a rating thread.

Mitzi is being overly kind.
IMHO, TNBLSB contains MM's worst performance.
She had yet to learn that purring and undulating is NOT singing and dancing!

BTW, with the death of Hugh O'Brien last year, Mitzi is the only cast member of that film still alive.

I got a cold chill. This girl had something I hadn't seen since silent pictures.
She had a kind of fantastic beauty like Gloria Swanson, when a movie star had to look beautiful, and she got sex on a piece of film like Jean Harlow.
Leon Shamroy, on MM's 1946 screen test

When you look at Marilyn on the screen, you don't want anything bad to happen to her.
You really care that she should be all righthappy.
Natalie Wood

This is a little kid who wants to be with the other little kids sucking lollipops and watching the rollercoaster, but she can't because they won't let her.
She's frightened to death of that public which thinks she is so sexy. My God, if they only knew.
Allan Whitey Snyder

She was not the usual movie idol. There was something democratic about her.
She was the type who would join in and wash up the supper dishes even if you didn't ask her.
Carl Sandburg


I took her as a serious actress before I ever met her. I think she's an a great comedienne,
but I also think that she might turn into the greatest tragic actress that can be imagined.
Arthur Miller

Marilyn was an incredible person to act withthe most marvelous I ever worked with, and I have been working for 29 years.
Montgomery Clift

When you speak of the American way of life, everybody thinks of chewing gum, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe.
the Russian magazine Nedvela

~~this whole thing about her feeling she has to get married and have children and be normal and well adjusted-I blame it on psychoanalysis.
Norman Mailer


When she's there, she's there. All of her is there! She's there to work.
Clark Gable


She looked like, if you bit her, milk and honey would flow from her.
Artist Franz Kline

Still she hangs like a bat in the heads of the men who met her, and none of us will ever forget her.
Sammy Davis, Jr.

Marilyn's need to be desired was so great that she could make love to a camera. Because of this, her lust aroused lust in audiences, sometimes even among women. There was nothing subtle about it. She was no tease. She was prepared, and even eager, to give what she offered.
William Manchester

She walks like a young antelope, and when she stands up it's like a snake uncoiling.
Jerry Wald on early MM

She comes out of the dressing room Norma Jeane. When she stepped in front of the camera, she was Marilyn.
Lawrence Schiller

A lady from way back . . . quiet, gentle, gracious, and the sort of girl you'd like to bring home and say, Mama, this is Marilyn.'
Columnist Henry McLemore,

Marilyn played the best game with the worst hand of anybody I know.
Edward Wagenknecht


That girl really has something. She looks like a new, model Lana Turner.
Producer Frank King to Sidney Skolsky, 1951

Miss Monroe is one of the greatest comedy actresses of our time. She is simply superb. Miss Mansfield I've never seen.
Vladimir Nabokov, when asked his opinion of America's sex symbols

It was impossible to think of Marilyn Monroe except as Cinderella.
Diana Trilling

One of the most unappreciated people in the world.
Joshua Logan



Marilyn was so bright about acting. Her trouble was only that she'd get so scared she wasn't going to be able to do it, and so tied up in knots, that then everyone thought she was dumb.
Peggy Feury

She's scared and unsure of herself. I found myself wishing that I were a psychoanalyst and she were my patient. It might be that I couldn't have helped her, but she would have looked lovelv on a couch.
Billy Wilder

Hollywood, Broadway, the night clubs all produce their quota of sex queens, but the public takes them or leaves them; the world is not as enslaved by them as it was by Marilyn Monroe, because none but she could suggest such a purity of sexual delight.
Diana Trilling

I asked her where she lived, and when she said at the Studio Club, I was impressed because I knew that a girl who looked like that could have the biggest house in Beverly Hills, she could have whatever she wanted because men would give it to her. Therefore, if she lived at the Studio Club it was because she had character.
Ben Lyon on his 1946 meeting with Norma Jeane Dougherty

I have great faith that her career would have continued. She was one of the greatest draws in the history of motion pictures, and today I think she would have been tops. Marilyn had a childlike quality which made men adore her. Yet women weren't jealous. Like John Wayne and a few other giants, she had a star quality that had nothing to do with acting. . . . What women in pictures can compare with her today? Nobody.
Ben Lyon


Marilyn Monroe had the most beautiful mouth ever. No one has ever been able to convey so much sex appeal with just one feature.
George Masters

Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display.
Cecil Beaton

I had always thought that all those amusing remarks she was supposed to have made for the press had probably been manufactured and mimeographed by her press agent, but they weren't. She was a very bright person, an instinctive type.
Photographer Elliott Erwitt

On the surface, she was still a happy girl. But those who criticized her never saw her as I did, crying like a baby because she often felt herself so inadequate.
Bill Travilla

Look at that face-she could be five years old.
Laurence Olivier

I did know her, and out of that sentiment for her, I could never talk about her for publication.
Marlon Brando

Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?' Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can't believe that life wasn't important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere.
MarIon Brando

She had such magnetism that if 15 men were in a room with her, each man would be convinced he was the one she'd be waiting for after the others left.
Publicist Roy Craft

It's difficult to say what Marilyn's future would have been, but I believe her career would have continued, and she would have been an important actress. I never worked with her, but I think some of the people who did failed to give her the patience and consideration she needed. She had her problems. She was disturbed in many areas, and those who weren't close friends of hers may not have realized how grave some of her personal problems were.
Peter Lawford

She's worth all the trouble.
Joshua Logan to Laurence Olivier



It may sound peculiar to say so, because she is no longer with us, but we were very close. Once when we were doing that picture together, I got a call on the set: my younger daughter had had a fall. I ran home and the one person to call was Marilyn. She did an awful lot to boost things up for movies when everything was at a low state; there'll never be anyone like her for looks, for attitude, for all of it.
Betty Grable


She can make any move, any gesture, almost insufferably suggestive.
Henry Hathaway



Joe DiMaggio may not have made a good husband for Marilyn, but no one cared more for her. He was always, before the divorce, and after the divorce, her best friend.
Allan Whitey' Snyder

I never worked with Marilyn Monroe, but if she'd lived, I think she would have been all right. She would have been President of the United States.
Walter Matthau

Dietrich made sex remote, Garbo made it mysterious, Crawford made it agonizing, but Monroe makes it amusing. Whenever a man thinks of Marilyn, he smiles at his own thoughts.
Milton Shulman

She represents to man something we all want in our unfulfilled dreams. She's the girl you'd like to double-cross your wife with. A man, he's got to be dead not to be excited by her.
Jean Negulesco



Gone was the shy, tense little girl voice, the slow groping for just the right word, the hesitation in answering a question . . . she came up, in a few minutes, with sprightlier conversation than most stars can manage in hours.
Dorothy Manning on the new Marilyn, circa 1956


I don't think I ever saw two people so dizzy with love for each other. Having known Arthur a long time as an introspective guy, it was, well, like a miracle to see him so outgoing.
Jim Proctor

Since her divorce from Arthur Miller, she's been in her best condition for a long time. She's happy!
Allan Whitey Snyder, shortly before Marilyn's death

Marilyn Monroe's unique charisma was the force that caused distant men to think that if only a well-intentioned, understanding person like me could have known her, she would have been all right. In death, it has caused women who before resented her frolicsome sexuality to join in the unspoken plea she leaves behind the simple, noble wish to be taken seriously.
Time magazine

Is not Monroe the image par excellence of this New Woman? She is voluptuous, but she admires Dostoyevsky.
Maurice Zolotow

She was a difficult woman, you know. We liked her and we said the nicest things about her and she deserved them; but, she was trouble and she brought that whole baggage of emotional difficulties of her childhood with her.
Norman Rosten



She knows the world, but this knowledge has not lowered her great and benevolent dignity, its darkness has not dimmed her goodness.
Edith Sitwell

She's one of the few stars who don't act as if she's made it. She does not coast. She worked harder in Let's Make Love than she did in Clash by Night. She's still the same person.
Jerry Wald

A lady from way back quiet. gracious, and the sort of girl you'd like to bring home and say, Mama, this is Marilyn.'
Columnist Henry McLemore

It can't be, it can't be, she couldn't have killed herself, she had three deals going.
A Hollywood agent

This atrocious death will be a terrible lesson for those whose principal occupation consists in spying on and tormenting the film stars.
Jean Cocteau

Anyone who has ever felt resentment against the good for being the good, and has given voice to it, is the murderer of Marilyn Monroe.
Ayn Rand

She will go on eternally.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis

In one sense, then, her life is completed, because her spirit is formed and has achieved itself. No matter what unpredictable events may be in her future, they cannot change who she is and what she has become.
Maurice Zolotow, 1960

She is a beautiful child. I don't think she's an actress at all, not in a traditional sense. What she has this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence- could never surface on the stage. It's so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever, is mad. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that's wandering through her like a jailed spirit.
Constance Colli


I have the same problem as Marilyn. We attract people the way honey does bees, but they're generally the wrong kind of people. People who want something from us if only our energy. We need a period of being alone to become ourselves.
Montgomery Clift

She seemed to have a kind of unconscious glow about her physical self that was innocent, like a child. When she posed nude, it was Gee, I am kind of, you know, sort of dishy,' like she enjoyed it without being egotistical.
Elizabeth Taylor

She was pure of heart. She was free of guile. She never understood either the adoration or the antagonism which she awakened.
Edward Wagenknecht

She stood for life. She radiated life. In her smile hope was always present. She glorified in life, and her death did not mar this final image. She had become a legend in her own time, and in her death, took her place among the myths of our century.
John Kobal

Thank you. Wonderful collection.

She was, and still is, the Star of stars.
No one (except Jane Russell) was really fond of working with her, though.

She was gorgeous.
And vulnerable.
She was flawed, but flawless.

I love her to death.

"We will bury you"-NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

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She was flawed, but flawless.

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What a wonderful expression.

She was radiant and as luminescent as a light bulb.
Yet, she also projected an innocent demeanor that was never equalled.

On the other hand, she was totally unprofessional, and her insecurities made working with her a nightmare for the directors and co-stars of her films.

And her morals were certainly questionable, especially after it was revealed that she had affairs with the Kennedy brothers, and maybe other married men as well.

But since she died young, she has been elevated to a cultural icon, just like Elvis, James Dean, and others.

I hope that answers your question.

Here's an interesting article, Snsurone. You may believe it, you may not

https://www.buzzfeed.com/marijaneg/the-scandalous-true-story-of-marilyn-monroe-jfk-12bng

Because she is literally Kim Kardashian of old Hollywood.

Olivier had the right idea: when Marilyn had to be purely decorative, just an object, she was terrificthere was nobody better. But when she had to act, she got fumbleitis, blowing her lines repeatedly, taking advice from New York method gurus that didn't help the production. Olivier directed her in The Prince and the Showgirl.

I've always been of the opinion that her stint at the Actors Studio, a/k/a The Lee Strasberg Ego Factory, did her no good personally or professionally. Arthur Miller may have been very well-meaning also in his attempts to shore her up as a 'serious' actress, but at the end of the day I think all of this really did not much more than intensify the insecurities and neurosis that apparently made her sometimes so difficult to work with.

50 Is The New Cutoff Age.