It can be difficult to separate the icon from the actress where Marilyn Monroe is concerned. She strove her entire life to be taken seriously, by both critics and audiences, and only partially succeeded. In considering her artistic canon, author James Haspiel observed “she had played a showgirl in just about every movie that she ever made.” In her final interview, she pleaded with the reporter “not to make a joke of me”, a plea that fell on deaf ears.

Many still view or dismiss her as nothing more than a vapid pin up girl, easy on the eyes but sorely lacking in the chops department. While her attempts to stretch her abilities in serious dramas such as Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), Niagara (1953) and The Misfits (1961) were noble but ultimately unsuccessful, Monroe used her sexy starlet persona to wonderful comedic effect in such classics as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Some Like it Hot (1959).

Playing off of her reputation as a brainless breathy blonde, Monroe manages to create a perfect balance between voluptuousness and vulnerability: part wide-eyed innocent, part sultry vamp. She frequently plays the straight (wo)man, professing blissful ignorance as the fawning and bumbling men surrounding her go to increasingly absurd lengths to garner her fancy, or, in the case of The Seven Year Itch, to remain immune to her considerable charms, which are on display in glorious Cinemascope. In How to Marry a Millionaire, Monroe is the naïve member of an impressive troika of conniving gold diggers, along with steely pro Lauren Bacall and tart-tongued Betty Grable. Monroe plays Pola Debovoise, a woman who refuses to wear her glasses out of fear that the old adage about “men seldom making passes…” is true. She thus spends quite a bit of the film walking into things and confusing several of the male characters, all to great comic effect. Her timing and natural gift for physical comedy are on full display, and she almost steals the film from veterans Bacall and Grable.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, released the same year, is a lavish musical co-starring Jane Russell in which Monroe plays the usual ditzy bombshell, though this time underneath the vapid exterior lies a shrewd young woman – Russell comments that “sometimes your brain amazes me” - who lusts after all things multi-caret. The audience never gets the feeling that Monroe’s character Lorelei is manipulative or conniving, however, which would have lessened her appeal considerably. When she observes that “it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as it is a poor man”, the statement does not ring cold or materialistic, only reasonably logical. She is upfront about the financial support she expects in return for any relationship, and Lorelei’s obsession with diamonds is a running gag that is referenced repeatedly, though never unkindly. As Russell, playing Lorelei’s cynical, streetwise friend Dorothy puts it, “You’re the only girl in the world that can stand on a stage with a spotlight in her eye and still see a diamond stuck in a man’s pocket.”

There is one priceless scene in the film where Lorelei gets stuck attempting to exit a room through the porthole. She is first spotted by young Henry Spofford III (George Winslow), an adult trapped in a child’s body. She pleads for his assistance in extricating her, which he agrees to in part because, as he informs her, “You’ve got a lot of animal magnetism.” Just then, Lorelei notices the impending arrival of Sir Francis Beekman (Charles Coburn), a rich, elderly gentleman on whom she has had designs. Spofford quickly covers the two of them with a blanket, so it appears that Lorelei is wrapped in the blanket, standing on a deck chair, instead of the more compromising position of being wedged in a porthole. Beekman then flirts with Lorelei and kisses what he believes to be her hand, which prompts a stern “Stop that” from the deep voiced Spofford.

The Seven Year Itch is probably most famous for providing the indelible image of Monroe standing on a subway grate, the wind billowing her skirt up around her thighs. The film itself is one of the great comedies of its time, or any other. Heavily censored from its original stage incarnation, the film still manages to insert a few knowing double entendres. Monroe, who never even gets a character name in the film (she is billed simply as “The Girl”) is at her comic best here, delivering lines like “I was up there watering the plants…they don’t even have a hose so I was using the cocktail shaker” with wide-eyed wonderment. When, upon hearing Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto she exclaims with breathy earnestness, “This is what they call classical music, isn’t it? I can tell because there is no vocal” everyone is laughing except her - she’s the only one not in on the joke. Were another actress to deliver that line, the laughter it received would be derisive, but with Monroe it never is – her naivety is endearing, not contemptible.

There is an amusing fantasy sequence featuring above-mentioned concerto where Tom Ewell, the hapless, henpecked husband who lives downstairs from Monroe, mugs his way through the piece, in the guise of an urbane playboy. Monroe, sitting on the bench next to him, vamps and gesticulates her way through his performance, urging him on with an impassioned cry of “Don’t stop! Don’t ever stop!” The scene, and the film itself, works because Monroe is able to convey a playful sexuality that is never leering or base in its manifestations, but simply innocent and pure. Unlike the other pin-up vixens of that era, like Jayne Mansfield or Mamie Van Doren, Monroe was the kind of sex symbol you could take home to meet your mother, which was part of her almost universal popularity. As Monroe puts it in The Seven Year Itch, “People keep falling desperately in love with me.”

In the films discussed above, and a few others, Marilyn Monroe displayed a genuine knack for comedy, as well as impeccable timing. When given the opportunity to work with talented directors like Wilder and Howard Hawks, she took full advantage, and, even though her high-maintenance reputation and on-set difficulties were the stuff of legend, the finished product is hard to argue with. Monroe’s unique mixture of purity and All-American sexuality defined the fifties, and this intoxicating blend of the sacred and the profane is on full, comedic display in How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, and the sublime Some Like it Hot, which is about as close to perfect as movies get.

In Let’s Make Love (1960), French playboy Jean Marc Clement (Yves Montand) remarks to Monroe’s character, Amanda Dell, that “You seem to be at home wherever you are.” He was only half right. Marilyn Monroe was never fully comfortable in more challenging dramatic fare, but she certainly was right at home in the world of comedy, where she starred in some of the undisputed classics of the genre.