Marilyn Monroe Centennial Retro Featuring 24 Films Set for Italy’s Torino Film Festival

Italy’s Torino Film Festival is set to celebrate the centennial of Marilyn Monroe’s birth with an extensive retrospective comprising 24 films featuring the Golden age of Hollywood icon.

Monroe – who was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 and died of a barbiturate overdose in 1962 at the age of 36 in her Brentwood home – will be homaged by fest with a mix of films that she starred in and works about her, including the Liz Garbus-directed doc “Love, Marilyn” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s meditation on Monroe’s death “La Rabbia,” in which she “becomes the ultimate symbol of wounded modernity,” according to a festival statement.  

The Torino Film Festival – which is Italy’s preeminent event for young directors and indie cinema – is assembling classic Marilyn Monroe titles such as Howard Hawks’ “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Henry Hathaway’s “How to Marry a Millionaire” Otto Preminger’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” Walter Lang’s “The Seven Year Itch,” and Billy Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot” and more portrayals such as Andrew Dominik’s Netflix film “Blonde” starring Ana de Armas as Monroe.

“The retrospective dedicated to Marilyn invites the audience to encounter one of the most recognizable, beloved, and misunderstood legends in the history of cinema,” said the fest’s artistic director Giulio Base in a statement. “A face that belongs to the collective imagination like no other, but which is presented here in its essence: the cinematic substance of the great classics of her career, films that not only made history, but continue to speak to the present day through their formal precision, modernity of vision, and interpretive power,” he added.

The 44th edition of the Torino Film Festival – which is the third headed by Base – will take place in Turin from Nov. 24 to Dec. 2, 2026.