Norma Jeane Mortenson was born on 1 June 1926 in Los Angeles and spent most of her childhood with foster families and, for a period, in an orphanage. She married at sixteen and was working in a Van Nuys factory during the war when an army photographer’s pictures of her led to modelling work. Between 1950 and 1961 she was among the most bankable stars in American cinema, and for most of that period she was also among the more poorly paid, because she was on a studio contract rather than a per-picture negotiation. She died on 4 August 1962, aged 36.

The modelling work led to a screen test and a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox in 1946, at which point she took the name Marilyn Monroe. The contract paid a junior weekly salary, was dropped after a year, and was picked up again by Columbia and then by Fox a second time. She spent the late 1940s in small parts, studying at the Actors’ Lab in Los Angeles and living on very little. Nothing in that period generated capital; it generated a contract that would take her most of a decade to escape.

Two supporting performances in 1950, in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, brought her to critical attention, and 1953 made her a headline attraction: Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire in a single year. The financial detail that defines her career sits inside that run. She was a contract player on a weekly studio wage while her co-stars negotiated fees per picture, and the films she carried returned many multiples of what she was paid for them (American Heritage).

Our estimate: Monroe earned roughly $1.5 million to $2.5 million from acting across her whole working life, or about $16 million to $27 million in today’s money. The shape is lopsided: nine years on a studio wage capped at $1,500 a week produced perhaps a third of it, and the rest came from the six years after she forced the contract open.

The Seven Year Itch in 1955 and Bus Stop in 1956 established that she could open a film on her own name, and Some Like It Hot in 1959 brought her a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy. The Misfits, released in 1961 and written for her by Arthur Miller, was the last film she completed.

The later fees are where her money is. From 1956 she was on $100,000 a picture at Fox with profit participation, and her outside pictures paid on that scale or better: Some Like It Hot carried a six-figure fee plus ten per cent of the gross, the most valuable single deal she ever signed. Eleven years of leading work is a short career by the standards of those she is now ranked alongside, which is why the arithmetic of her own money stays so small.

The American Film Institute ranked her sixth on its list of the greatest female screen legends of classic Hollywood (American Film Institute), and she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her photographic image is among the most reproduced of the twentieth century, which is the commercially decisive fact about her: the recognition did not peak during her lifetime and has not decayed since, and it is the asset that the modern licensing business is built on.

She signed almost nothing of the kind that is now routine; the studio system did not permit its contract players to trade on their own names, and the endorsement economy she would have dominated arrived after her. The association most people assume she was paid for was never a deal at all: Chanel built a No. 5 campaign in 2013 around archive photographs and a recovered 1960 interview recording, fifty-one years after her death, in which she had simply said what she wore in bed (WWD). That campaign was a licence granted by the owners of her name, decades removed from anything she agreed to herself.

At the end of 1954 she left Hollywood for New York and founded Marilyn Monroe Productions with the photographer Milton Greene, announcing it at the start of 1955 – one of the first instances of a major Hollywood actress owning her own production company. The standoff with Fox that followed ended in January 1956 with a renegotiated non-exclusive seven-year deal covering four pictures at $100,000 per feature, profit participation, and the right to select stories and approve directors (Prospect; on the studio contract system). Her company produced The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957.

She bought a Spanish colonial house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood in 1962 for about $75,000 – the only home she ever owned in her own name (CBS News). Los Angeles City Council designated it a Historic-Cultural Monument in 2024 after its owners obtained a demolition permit, and the owners have been in litigation over the designation since (Deadline). Her clothing has since outperformed her property: the gown she wore at Madison Square Garden in May 1962 sold at Julien’s in November 2016 for $4.8 million (PBS NewsHour; Rolling Stone).