The centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, 2026 The autonomy and agency of an actor taking on a major media compan...

The centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, 2026 The autonomy and agency of an actor taking on a major media company and winning * Today is the centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, and over at Prospect I have an article on how Marilyn Monroe took on Twentieth Century and won. Below I set out the story with more context and more detail. * By way of background – Ella Fitzgerald Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. This meant that while everyone else was listening to disco or punk or new romantics, I was listening to Deanna Durbin and Ella Fitzgerald. When I was older I sought to listen to every available recording of Fitzgerald, from her time with Chick Webb onwards (and I also watched also every film of Durbin). For me Fitzgerald’s songbooks, produced by Norman Granz, were perhaps the greatest artistic achievement of the twentieth century. If I ever were to be on desert island discs, every track would probably be a Fitzgerald one (apart…