The Birth of Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe was born in 1946 at the age of 19. As Norma Jean Dougherty, she had come to Hollywood dreaming of being a movie star, ready to leave her name and husband behind her. Her modelling agency asked a successful young photographer, Joseph Jasgur, to take some photographs that would impress the big casting director. The assignment worked; by autumn she had a film contract in her pocket and a new name - Marilyn Monroe. For more than 40 years these photographs were locked away and remained, with rare exceptions, unpublished.