Signed by Twentieth-Century Fox, she changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, but for the next few years she had only minor roles in several movies; during one period of unemployment she posed nude for a pin-up calendar that would later become a collector's item. Not until her small roles in two 1950 movies--The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve--did her career take off, and, promoted as a slightly ditzy blonde exuding a breathless sexuality, she became a star and celebrity. Monroe was married to former baseball star Joe DiMaggio for about nine months during 1954. Determined to shed her image as a sex symbol, she began to study at Lee and Paula Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York City.

She gave two of her more sophisticated performances--in Bus Stop (1956) and Some Like It Hot (1959)--and in 1956 she married the playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) and starred in a movie he wrote for her, The Misfits (1961). They divorced in 1961, and Monroe's life continued in its roller coaster fashion: she was briefly hospitalized in a mental clinic, she was dropped from a movie for failure to show up on time, and she was taking drugs for her various problems.