Intimate portraits
Marilyn Monroe going over her lines for a difficult scene she is about to play in the film "The Misfits". 1960. © Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos
Eve was known for getting beyond the surface and capturing something of the real person underneath
In this picture Marilyn Monroe is memorising her lines on the set of the film The Misfits. Monroe found it very difficult to memorise her lines and felt insecure about this. Because of the close bond Eve gained from working with Marilyn over several years she was able to capture the fragility and vulnerability behind the confident exterior.
Eve describes this fragility in her book In Retrospect
"My most poignant memory of Marilyn is of how distressed, troubled and still radiant she looked when I arrived in Nevada to work on The Misfits. She asked immediately how she looked and she wanted and needed reassurance. It was four years since we had worked together, and she looked into my eyes for a long moment to make sure she could still trust me. Then she drew her breath, sighed and said, "I'm thirty-four years old. I've been dancing for six months [on Let's Make Love]. I've had no rest, I'm exhausted. Where do I go from here?" She was not asking me - she was asking herself. This was less than a year before she died. It occurred to me then that when she had lived with the fantasy of Marilyn that she had created, that fantasy had sustained her, but now the reality had caught up with her and she found it too much to bear.”
In another of Eve’s books she wrote:
“If you are careful with people, they will offer you part of themselves. This is the big secret.”
A small selection of Eve’s intimate portraits
