Marilyn Monroe’s final hours, more detailed in The Unheard Tapes

Knowing that her appearance worked both for and against her (although mainly For), Marilyn Monroe wanted more than anything to be taken seriously as an actress.

“If I’m a star, people made me a star…but I want to be wonderful, you know?” she was heard saying in an audio recording. At another point, she said: “What I would like to accomplish, I would like to be a good actress, a real actress. An artist with integrity.”

Among the dozens of old interview clips included in the Netflix documentary, his Men prefer blondes co-star Jane Russell told the reporter Anthony Summers that they would work all day and Monroe would meet with her acting coach in the evening. “She was very bright and she wanted to learn,” Russell said, “and was interested in anything to help her control her career.”

John Hustonwho directed Monroe in one of his first films, in the 1950s Asphalt Jungleand his last completed film, 1961 The marginalizedrecalls meeting the “very fresh, very attractive, rather shy, timid” young woman for the first time during her audition, where she “read her lines beautifully.”

And her appeal went beyond her looks, the filmmaker noted. Although she was the “sex symbol of this century,” he noted in the 1980s, “it wasn’t just about sex. Women felt the same way as men. There was always something deeply moving in Marilyn.”