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Dorothy Dandridge as Queen Melmendi in Tarzan’s Peril (1951)

It has become more widely recognized that Marilyn Monroe enjoyed close friendships with Black actors, singers, and other entertainers. It is less well known that she modeled her bombshell look and trademark gestures not only on 1930s blonde archetypes, but also on African-American stars, like Dorothy Dandridge, whom she knew from the Los Angeles Actors’ Lab.

Monroe worked hard at cultivating her persona, down to the most minute details:

Monroe gave us the dumb-blonde routine and we fell for it. It’s hard for us to believe that a “bimbo” invented one of the arresting identities of our century. But…this was a woman who knew what she was doing and went about the business of self-invention with determination and skill.

She got a nose job and a new chin…She changed her voice, facial expressions, and body movements. Monroe even reinvented her history…The same biographies are filled with evidence that Marilyn was no gift of nature but a creation of Monroe herself.

This process of self-fashioning was both gendered and racialized; in “The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness,” Lois W. Banner argues that her “whiteness…offers a case study of the interaction between race, sexuality, gender, and class in the formation of individual and cultural identity.”

The clips above call attention to Dandridge’s breathy delivery of her dialogue and the coquettish movements of her mouth, especially the way she purses her lips to speak and stretches her bottom lip sideways and down to smile while fluttering her eyelids. Monroe adopted and adapted these and other mannerisms—entirely absent from the physical repertoire of the white actresses cited as her models—resulting in the style of nonverbal communication that she used to such striking effect.

To my eye, Monroe impersonators are always imitating Monroe copying Dandridge. She may often be called ”the Black Marilyn Monroe,” but I think it is more fair to say Monroe was the white Dorothy Dandridge.

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