If Mae West was a boss-heroine, then Marilyn Monroe was a victim-heroine. The actress Shelley Winters knew them both.

"I admired Mae West but I wanted to be Marilyn - she had all the assets." West agreed.

She said of Monroe: "She was the only girl who ever came close to me in the sex department. All the others had were big boobs."

Certainly, Monroe had the finest body ever recorded. But she was lucky she was born in the 1920s.

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arthur miller marilyn monroe

Marilyn and husband Arthur Miller - she admired intelligent men

If she had been conceived today, she would, without much doubt, have been aborted.

It would be hard to imagine a more depressing and hostile family background than hers, composed of severe mental illness, alcoholism, divorce, illegitimacy and desertion.

Her mother was a pathetic creature who spent most of her life on the edge of sanity and more than half of it in institutions.

The men of the family were alcoholics, when they were on the scene at all.

Her mother, when not institutionalised, worked in a film lab, and the father may have been a man in the same lab, his name now unknown. Monroe never met him or knew who he was for sure.

The nearest she got to a parent was her mother's friend Grace McKee, who also worked in the lab.

But Grace could not always look after the child and farmed her out to a series of semi-professional foster parents, 11 in all.

In at least two of these homes, the pretty child was sexually abused.

After much pleading, she was taken back by Grace, who gave her, aged ten, her first lipstick and taught her to use it.

Grace had just married her fourth husband. He drank, and tried to rape the child.

So it was back to foster parents again. When abused, as she repeatedly was, Marilyn was blamed for being "provocative".

At 15, a man called James Dougherty, then 21, offered to marry her to take her off Grace's hands. She was told it was that or go into an orphanage.

So, three weeks after her 16th birthday, she was married.

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Behind the smiles Monroe 'felt raped' by the camera

It was wartime, he left to join the army, and she lived with his parents, working in war factories, as a chute packer, paint-sprayer and so on.

In one of them she was spotted by an army magazine photographer, who advised her to take up modelling.

"You were born to be married to the camera," he told her.

He was right. She had a rare magic, an ability to interlace herself with the process of photography, whether still or motional, to a degree no other actress has ever possessed.

She was the spoiled princess of celluloid, but her tragedy is that she never recognised or understood the birthright.

On the contrary, her life was a constant struggle not to be possessed and raped by the camera, punctuated by rare moments of submission when she engaged in lovemaking with the merciless machine.

She never understood that it loved her, let alone why; and throughout her professional life she felt that it was not just pursuing but persecuting her.

She was shy to the point of mania, suffering from both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, sometimes - it seemed - at the same time.

For her, appearing in the morning on time to begin filming required courage akin to that demanded of a soldier who had gone "over the top" too many times, whose reserves had been exhausted, and who was now asked to do it again with nothing but fear.

Her 15-year career as a film actress was the saga of a fight to the death

On the one hand, there was the camera, which lusted after it and deified it. over her magical body.
Marilyn Monroe Seven Year Itch

Marilyn Monroe in the the Seven Year Itch

On the other was the fragile, terrified woman who saw the lens as a devouring monster and tried to escape it.

If she had understood the nature of the struggle, all might have been well.

Yet all she grasped was her fear. But the camera's lust for her propelled her upward throughout her career.

She started as an extra but she tended, involuntarily and unconsciously, to upstage those with speaking parts.

Given a small speaking part, she upstaged the stars.

There was something unfathomable about her. She could look horrible: hair greasy and lank, eyes dull, skin unhealthy, figure recalcitrant, movements unco-ordinated.

Then the camera poured its love on, and transformed, her.

Many of the most beautiful stills of Monroe were taken at a time when she was described as "hideous".

The photographers could not believe their eyes when they saw the prints.

The skirt-blowing scene over a hot-air grating, filmed for The Seven Year Itch and witnessed by 2,000 people, causing traffic jams, hilarity and anger, had been tried countless times before, with all kinds of actresses, always ending up in awkward vulgarity. With Monroe it worked perfectly.

When it came to men, the two greatest Hollywood predators of the age failed to make her.

Actor George Raft, so successful and insatiable that he once made love to seven chorus girls in a single night, was rebuffed.

So was the powerful producer Darryl Zanuck, who never forgave her for giving him the brush-off and did his best to derail her career.

Yet any absent-minded professor was in with a chance. She and Shelley Winters once listed the men they would like to sleep with.

Winters wrote down actors, Monroe picked Albert Einstein and Arthur Miller.

Olivier, directing her in The Prince And The Showgirl, whispered to her just before a key take, "be sexy."

This was otiose advice since she was incapable of being anything else, but it was a vulgar insult to someone aspiring to be the world's greatest actress.

She flounced off to her dressing room in tears.

Billy Wilder was the only director who ever agreed to work with Monroe twice.

To the end of his days, he used to delight listeners with anecdotes of how he contrived to get her to appear on the set of Some Like It Hot and remember her lines.

One, "Hello, it's Sugar," required 41 takes.

Her co-star Tony Curtis recalled the filming with bitterness. When they played a scene together, Wilder was never content until he got a perfect take from Monroe, and went on and on.

While hers got better, Curtis's own deteriorated, and the printed take was always her best and often his worst.

He got his revenge by claiming they had a brief affair "and kissing her was like kissing Hitler".

Monroe's last period in the early 1960s before her overdose and death was complicated by her involvement with the tawdry "Camelot" circus of President John F. Kennedy and his vulpine brother Robert.

Memorably she sang "Happy Birthday" to the President.

It was the last epiphany of the star the camera worshipped - a tragic heroine, raised from nothing to sublimity and then dashed into dust.

? ADAPTED from Heroes by Paul Johnson, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on February 14 at £20. ° 2008, Paul Johnson. To order a copy for £18 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

she had an oversize ass and thick legs