Los Angeles, 1926. Norma Jeane Mortenson is born to a single mother with mental health problems. She will never know her father. Orphanages, foster families, abuse a Dickensian childhood that would forever shape the most desired woman of the twentieth century.

“It’s difficult to explain Marilyn Monroe, because you can’t explain Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. You can only sit and marvel in awe” so describes director Jean Negulesco. “Lee Strasberg once said that Marilyn Monroe was a dream of Marilyn Monroe” adds biographer Carl E. Rollyson. “Without the camera, Marilyn doesn’t exist.”

“The Child Goddess” is undoubtedly the most comprehensive, profound, and moving portrait of the woman who, more than any other in this century, touched the collective imagination, becoming a cultural symbol, a universal icon. The numerous clips from her films and other excerpts bring Marilyn back to life for audiences around the world.

The memories of friends and colleagues Maureen Stapleton, Joshua Logan, Sam Shaw, Susan Strasberg, Jean Negulesco, Eli Wallach, and many others reveal a Marilyn full of human warmth, impulsive, sensitive, shy, vulnerable, simple yet ambitious. Above all, a woman determined to protect her artistic development and her integrity.

Like a Dickens tale, this documentary guides the viewer through the crucial events of her life: the orphanages, the foster families, the struggle for success, the three marriages to James Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller none of which ever managed to reconcile her with the life that consumed her. The battle against the rigid rules of the studios. And finally, the fall.

John Kobal calls her “the greatest and the last Hollywood star.” A radiant light that was extinguished too soon, but one that revealed the true essence of Marilyn Monroe. Since the tragic August 5, 1962, we all think of her as a fragile child without a father.

From “Niagara” (1953) to “Some Like It Hot” (1959), from “The Misfits” (1961) her last completed film, alongside Clark Gable, himself also nearing the end Marilyn embodied the American dream and its contradictions. The naive blonde and the wounded woman. The sex symbol and the serious actress who studied at the Actors Studio. The goddess and the child.

Marilyn Monroe left us in 1962, at only 36 years old. But as she herself said: “I want to be remembered as a woman who changed the perception of women.”

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