What is it — even still — about Marilyn Monroe?

A century after her birth, the woman born Norma Jeane still has American culture hanging on her every breathy vocalization. Monroe remains the ultimate standard-bearer of Hollywood glamour — a woman who died (in 1962, at the tragically premature age of 36) before the sexual revolution but who helped usher in a revved-up sensuality onscreen. The era she inaugurates lives on: A certain stripe of actress will inevitably be compared, first, to Monroe. The star has been the butt of too many mean jokes, the object of veneration and a muse for film and literary retellings that have elevated her into the realm of myth.

Consider some of those adaptations of her story, to understand why it is that Monroe still compels us. In the 2011 film “My Week With Marilyn,” for instance, Monroe is near the end of her life, and nearer the end of her career. Trudging through production of the vexed project “The Prince and the Showgirl,” Monroe — who would reignite things briefly with her next, ebulliently witty performance in Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic “Some Like It Hot” — is wounded and addled. Played by Michelle Williams at her most tremulous, this Marilyn is something like a butterfly that Hollywood wants to pin to a board and display. The project honors Monroe, but sees her, first and almost exclusively, as a victim, one who Eddie Redmayne’s gentle production assistant tries and fails to save.

Some 11 years later, Ana de Armas assumed the role in “Blonde,” a project that director Andrew Dominik had tried to put together for years with reported leading ladies Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain falling into and out of the cast. “Blonde” was a tough sell; based on Joyce Carol Oates’ expansive imagining of Monroe’s inner life, the script depicts sexual degradation (including at the hands of President John F. Kennedy) and a grasping pool of need. And de Armas, born in Cuba, was an unlikely choice, but — as she told Variety upon the film’s release — she leveraged her own feelings of nervousness and insecurity to more thoroughly inhabit Monroe. “Using my emotions — how I felt about playing the role — was the way I approached the entire film,” she said, “embracing my fears and my vulnerability, my feeling uncomfortable and my insecurities.”

“Blonde,” running almost three hours, gave de Armas every opportunity to use that vulnerability. But it also shows us precisely what made Monroe great. If, in “My Week With Marilyn,” Monroe is only a shade of what she was and could be — a faded talent in need of protection — “Blonde” depicts the star as just that: A star, as in an incandescent ball of flame. This Monroe is fueled by insecurity, yes, but by rage and discontent at the fact that she isn’t seen for all that she can do, that she’s treated merely as a sex object by the men in her life and by an industry in which she stood out but never, when alive, received respect. It’s a remarkable tribute, and terribly hard to watch, in part because one wishes Monroe could have been quite so venerated in her 36 years.

---

That’s the magic, too, of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” a hymn to Monroe that was later rewritten as a tribute to Princess Diana — another maltreated blonde icon who died at 36 under horrific circumstances, and whose legacy was only seen clearly after she left us. The original “Candle in the Wind,” released in 1973, addresses Monroe from the perspective of a fan, “the young man in the 22nd row,” who refers to the actress as “Norma Jeane” and reassures her that though her flame has been extinguished, she would be remembered fondly.

Monroe seems to draw tributes like this, ones that honor her victimization as part of the legend. (“Blonde,” which began its creative life as a shrewdly appraising novel by the cerebral Oates, avoids this trap.) “Hollywood created a superstar / and pain was the price you paid” is one illustrative lyric; the 1997 rewrite, which addressed a far more recent loss, tended to avoid such reflections on the cost of fame in favor of a more general tribute to Diana’s strength and elegance. And yet the original “Candle in the Wind” is written with such evident affection — and performed with such humane sympathy — that what might otherwise enter the realm of pathos is, instead, received as an act of love.

Part of its trick, and why it’s entered into the canon of Marilyn tributes, is the manner in which it mirrors back Monroe’s own best qualities. Onscreen, Monroe has a sort of radical openness. “Some Like It Hot,” for instance, might collapse like a poorly cooked soufflé if Monroe’s Sugar Kane were able to detect the obvious, that the two men in misjudged drag accompanying her are not in fact her two new best girlfriends. Sugar is sweetly naive, but never dumb; her falling for the act can be taken as a sign of her big-heartedness, her willingness to suspend suspicion in favor of extending the benefit of the doubt.

We, in the 22nd row and all those around it, can’t help but swoon. In “Some Like It Hot,” too, there’s the unforgettable moment when Sugar, frustrated at her poor luck, mopes, “I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop” — a childlike formulation to which anyone can relate. Monroe can, to those viewing her work uncharitably, get knocked for seeming to project a sort of foolishness, but the sharper read may be that she was a master at calibrating kindness and warmth, and inviting the audience along for the journey. Her seeing her dress blown up by a subway grate in “The Seven Year Itch” or, perhaps more infamously, her birthday serenade to Kennedy, were shrewd jokes that Monroe herself was in on.

And, in an era less sexually open than this one, they represented beckoning gestures toward the audience. Hollywood had, for decades, been governed by the restrictive Hays Code, which attempted to push moviemaking into Puritan morality. But, for Monroe as performer, sexual innuendo need not be taboo or even scary. It could, if deployed with a knowing wink and a sense of joy, even be fun.

---

It’s this quality of knowingness that elevates Monroe’s extended come-ons to the audience into the realm of art; Monroe was in control of her instrument even as, sadly, she lacked control over so much else in her life. And we owe it to Monroe not to allow that quality of her work to get lost. The sad fact of her victimization and her struggles in life can threaten to blot out the subtler, trickier elements of her magic. Hollywood did indeed, as Elton John sang, put Norma Jeane on a treadmill; she emerged from it, though, a legend for reasons beyond her tragic fate.

This alchemical balance between the sorrow of what became of Monroe and the glory of what she was able to achieve may account for why Monroe has no true heir. Many estimable actresses have elements of her fame, or have sought to capture her essence; no less a talent than Lindsay Lohan, certainly no stranger to tabloid infamy, restaged Bert Stern’s famous “last sitting” nude photoshoot in 2008, generating sparks but nowhere near the fire Monroe at her peak might have.

But then, the culture had shifted, too: Part of Monroe’s essential quality is that she seemed to see around a corner, toward a time when sex was not taboo. If everything is within bounds, then a contemporary star has less to push back against. If a contemporary movie showed its star’s dress being blown in the wind, would anyone bat an eye? We have OnlyFans now.

The culture has shifted, too, away from a subtle understanding that people contain multitudes. Monroe was pilloried, in her moment, but she was also allowed by Hollywood to test her talents in a manner that, decades later, actresses known for their physicality still struggle to do. “The Prince and the Showgirl” was a tough shoot, but it paired Monroe with no less a legend than Lawrence Olivier; Arthur Miller, Monroe’s third husband, was already a Pulitzer winner for “Death of a Salesman” when he wrote her a star vehicle, “The Misfits.”

That became Monroe’s final film, and was another painful and challenging shoot for Monroe — but also stands as proof of her ambition. Monroe was perceived as a light comedy actress, but how does that jibe with her attempting to surmount a script by Miller?

This, too, deserves to be part of the Monroe legacy — and a trait that those stars still in her wake might emulate. Monroe didn’t have the option of creating opportunities by executive producing her own projects or finding great material. Her only option was to gut it out, finding her way forward both by serving the audience what they might not even have realized they wanted and by perfecting her craft. Too infrequently discussed as a part of Monroe’s story is the fact of her intensive study of method acting with the Actors Studio’s Lee Strasberg. (This came after Monroe had already established her fame with films like “How to Marry a Millionaire” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” — she needn’t have bothered, but for the fact that she genuinely cared.) In another era, Monroe might have been one of the stars on “Inside the Actors Studio,” interviewed by James Lipton in front of a group of students eager to hear her wisdom. In her own time, Monroe’s study became a footnote. What she learned, though, infused her work.

---

That work remains — though Monroe’s name and image are known even to those for whom the title “The Seven Year Itch” means little more than a painful-sounding malady. One might say that her true work was the art of fame, even as it was often constructed for her by others. (Andy Warhol’s silkscreened images of Monroe, produced shortly after her death, reframed her as a candy-colored avatar of celebrity, a figure of campy glamour whose essential dignity manages to permeate the frame even despite the neon tone.)

But there are plenty of Old Hollywood stars whose names and whose reputations persist. But there’s something about Monroe that’s just special. People don’t feel essentially close to Bette Davis or Lana Turner or Katharine Hepburn in quite the same way. Her tragic fate is a part of the story, but perhaps because it places us all in the 22nd row with Elton John: How might someone so tapped into her humanity have suffered so grievously?

Because that’s the essence of Marilyn — her sorrow and her beauty and her wit and her extensive acting training collide in the form of a woman utterly in touch with her humanity and able to convey it through the screen. She may always have gotten the fuzzy end of the lollipop. But she knew how to share its sweetness with all of us, too.

***

The Seven Year Itch

When it was released in June 1955, “The Seven Year Itch” was an instant smash. The Billy Wilder comedy earned $12 million at the box office and boosted Marilyn Monroe’s career even higher.

In the mid-1950s, there was no bigger star. “Niagra,” in 1953, cemented her sex symbol status, but with such films as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “How to Marry a Millionaire,” she slyly upended the “dumb blonde” trope. By 1955, she was marked by various “decency” leagues as a threat to all mankind, and one particular image in “Itch” gave naysayers more grist for their mills — and gave the world an iconic image, but it’s not what you think.

In the film, as Monroe and co-star Tom Ewell walk down a New York sidewalk, she rushes over to a subway grate and says, “Ooh, can you feel the breeze from the subway? Isn’t it delicious?” as the camera pans down and her dress blows up, only rather modestly exposes her legs.

In the film, as Monroe and co-star Tom Ewell walk down a New York sidewalk, she rushes over to a subway grate and says, “Ooh, can you feel the breeze from the subway? Isn’t it delicious?” as the camera pans down and her dress blows up, only rather modestly exposes her legs.

But what became iconic are the staged photos taken later on, showing her whole body and a lot more thigh as she fights to keep her dress down. That’s the image that has played in the imaginations of ad men, the fashion biz, pop stars, artists and countless others in the last 70-plus years. It’s also the scene that, it’s said, led to her divorce from Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio. He was on set that day in New York, along with hundreds of onlookers, and was mortified how his wife was exposed in the scene. They divorced shortly after filming wrapped.

But her star rose and that joyful, beautiful, rather guileless young woman trying to stay cool in a hot city summer lives forever. — Carole Horst