A platinum blonde starlet in a flowing white dress, standing over a subway grate while filming "The Seven Year Itch." This is the image that most people see when they think of the famous starlet and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. She was legendary, popular, and exciting. Every woman wanted to be her, and everyone wanted to know her, but did they really know her at all? What happened behind closed doors, in the famous star’s life? What horrors did her psyche inflict upon her? Horrors that in the end, she faced alone.

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on June 1, 1926, Marilyn Monroe was a singer, actress, and model during the 1950s that did not have the pleasant, loving life that most children experience. Her mother was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, causing her to be hospitalized. Monroe then spent two years in an orphanage and endured countless foster homes. She never knew her father, as he had left her mother before she was born.

Many people thought, and still think that she was all about sex, but she wasn’t. She tried so hard to make people love her, even going to the measures of having her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, on the set of every movie she made. But some people think she was something more, special. Joshua Logan, director of her film "Bus Stop," says this of her: "Marilyn is as a near genius as any actress I ever knew. She is an artist beyond artistry. She is the most completely realized and authentic film actress since Garbo. She has that same mystery. She is pure cinema."

In my mind, she was just that... pure cinema. She threw herself into her work like a thoroughbred on a racetrack.

The downside, though, is that there's no longer a place for a Marilyn Monroe. Where would she fit in today? Hanging out with Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill? Constructing works of postmodern self-commentary with James Franco? Trying to choose between the werewolf and the vampire?”

What is so inspiring about this one star that proves her spirit is still here? If one looks hard enough, they will find that she’s still alive in people’s hearts. She is everywhere, her influence has no boundaries. From movies like My Week with Marilyn to personalities like Lady Gaga, we see that she didn’t really leave us. “What Monroe really represents, beyond sex and beauty and glamour, is something that was disappearing probably even in my grandfather's day: romance. Monroe was an ideal of womanhood at a time when men still valued such a thing. That era may be gone, but it seems like we'll always have Marilyn Monroe."