SHE would have been 91 last week if she had lived, but our images of film-star Marilyn Monroe are forever stuck in her vibrant youth as sadly she died in her thirties.

Here is Marilyn looking, well, content, reading a book in New York in 1956 when she was thirty.

She was about to marry award-winning playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and although critics could not understand the attraction of the blonde sex symbol to the crusty Miller, it seemed to work for a while with Marilyn shrugging off her habitual depression and throwing herself into the role of homemaker, wife and part-time mother to Miller’s two children.

She even converted to Miller’s Judaism, telling one interviewer: “I can identify with the Jews. Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me.” Within weeks, Egypt banned all of her movies.

Her career was also going well then. She had been suspended by film studios a couple of years earlier for pulling out of a film project, but she negotiated her return, and just months before this picture was taken, starred in one of the biggest box office successes of her career, The Seven Year Itch.

Sadly the marriage did not last, and her reputation for being difficult on stage grew after appearing in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and needing numerous takes.

She died of barbiturate poisoning in 1962, a sad end to a career which gave her fame around the world.