*Update*: World Record in Palm Springs: Thousand Fans Celebrate Monroe's 100th Birthday

The celebration day has arrived: More than a thousand fans dressed as Marilyn Monroe gathered in downtown Palm Springs, California, setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people in costume as a single person. Stern reports that Palm Springs was chosen because Monroe's Hollywood career began there – a symbolically charged location for a symbolically charged date.

The record attempt was just one of many program highlights with which Hollywood and the international cultural world marked the centenary. SWR reports that a series of special events launched in Monroe's hometown of Los Angeles – film screenings, exhibitions, and concerts where her most famous song echoed once again. In Lima, too, Peru's cultural institute ICPNA followed suit with a retrospective that honored Monroe as a comedian and actress beyond the sex symbol cliché imposed by Hollywood.

Icon and Vulnerable Personality

Across the media, two narratives dominated the day: that of the radiant icon and that of the vulnerable Norma Jeane Baker behind it. Spiegel writes that Monroe, despite – or perhaps because of – her only 36 years of life, became one of the few truly enduring film legends whose image has burned itself into the collective memory. The tension between public persona and private suffering remains the true fascination that has occupied generations of fans and researchers.

That the Monroe myth has not faded even in 2026 is demonstrated by the sheer breadth of reactions: from mass gatherings in California to memorial celebrations in Latin America to special broadcasts in Europe. The 100th birthday has once again proven that no other Hollywood personality of the 20th century possesses a comparable cultural half-life.