Last images of Marilyn to snap up thousands

Published on Saturday 6 April 2002 01:00

NEWLY-uncovered pictures of Marilyn Monroe are to be sold at auction.

Just a week after they were taken by American society photographer Bert Stern in 1962, Monroe was found dead on her bed, an empty bottle of sedatives nearby.

The batch of colour and mono prints of the star taken by Stern during her last official photography session and entitled The Last Sitting have surfaced at Sotheby’s in London.

One, showing Monroe’s smiling eyes above a Nikon camera, her long-gloved finger on the shutter, should make up to 3,500.

Another, showing the star biting a pearl necklace, is estimated to fetch up to 4,000.

A third shows a smiling Monroe cuddling the sheets in bed while a fourth shows the screen legend, naked from the waist up, holding a coral necklace between her fingers.

They are expected to go for up to 2,200 each.

Monroe, the illegitimate daughter of Gladys Pearl Baker, a film studio negative cutter with a history of mental disturbance, was working as a paint sprayer in a defence plant in 1944 when she was discovered by an army photographer.

In 1946, 20th Century Fox signed her to a year’s contract at $125 a week.

Her name was changed from Norma Jean Baker to Marilyn Monroe and she was given a bit part in the 1948 movie Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!

By the time she married baseball hero Joe di Maggio in 1954, she was Hollywood’s biggest sex symbol.