You don’t need a centenary to celebrate the talent and beauty of an icon like Marilyn Monroe, but the truth is that, as a century has passed since her birth, The Palace, Madrid has decided to recover—for our infinite joy and forever myth-loving spirit—a series of images of the actress that had vanished for decades. It was the summer of 1962 when American photographer Allan Grant captured the melancholic and near-sighted eyes of the artist for LIFE, during one of the last interviews she gave before her death. The star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Some Like It Hot and Bus Stop, born Norma Jean, was 36 when she died and, although the world knew her as Hollywood’s greatest sex symbol, she had long been trying to prove that she was much more than that, including, among other things, by choosing roles such as the one she played alongside Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift in The Misfits.
More than six decades later, fifteen of those photographs, recovered and restored, arrive in Madrid for the first time to star in Marilyn Monroe 1926–2026: The Lost Photographs, an exhibition that can be visited from today, October 27, until January 18, 2027 at 27 Club, the bar of The Palace Hotel, Madrid. “The idea is to show the real and unexpected Marilyn,” explains to Condé Nast Traveler Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, the curator of the exhibition, who has been working for years with some of the most important photographic archives in the United States.
The project began to take shape in 2021, when the managers of the 1962 MM LLC archives, Chris Flannery and Jason Greene, were negotiating the acquisition of a true treasure: the materials from that final interview and hundreds of photographs that had remained lost for decades.
