This year, Los Angeles celebrates the centenary of its most luminous star. Here is how to experience the city through Marilyn Monroe’s eyes.
Marilyn Monroe’s story is a classic Los Angeles triumph: born in the city, overcoming a challenging childhood, and rising to become one of the most enduring screen icons in the history of cinema. Decades after her untimely death at 36, her charm, wit, and incandescent star power continue to light up screens and hearts around the globe.
To honour the centenary of her birth, here’s where to go in LA to experience the city through Marilyn’s eyes, from landmark exhibitions to the restaurants she haunted and the hotel rooms she called home.
1. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures: Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon
The must-see experience of the centenary season is Marilyn Monroe: Hollywood Icon, a landmark new exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures that examines Monroe as a visionary actor and image-maker. On display are hundreds of original objects — many shown publicly for the first time — including the famous pink dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), posters, portraits, photographs, production documents, letters, and rarely seen personal materials that illuminate her extraordinary agency in shaping her own Hollywood legend.
Opened in May, the exhibition runs alongside a 17-film retrospective series beginning in June, including Some Like It Hot, How to Marry a Millionaire, and The Seven Year Itch. The film schedule is available on the Academy Museum website.
2. Classic Experiences: Cruise LA in a Convertible Cadillac
For the most glamorous introduction to Marilyn’s Los Angeles, look no further than Classic Experiences‘ dedicated Marilyn Monroe’s Los Angeles Tour. Recline in a convertible Cadillac and cruise the streets of the city that made her a star, taking in Marilyn’s Beverly Hills home, the Hotel Bel-Air where she posed for Bert Stern’s famous Last Sitting photographs, Canter’s Deli — a favourite haunt during her marriage to Arthur Miller — and her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Choose between a four-hour or six-hour tour.
3. The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel: Sleep Where Marilyn Lived
The landmark Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel was Marilyn Monroe’s home for two years at the very dawn of her modelling career, and it remains one of the most evocative addresses in Hollywood. Monroe stayed in one of the hotel’s vintage 1950s cabanas during her first professional magazine shoot, which took place at the Roosevelt’s celebrated Tropicana Pool — a pool that remains virtually unchanged today.
Guests can stay in the 750-square-foot Marilyn Monroe Suite, which features a loft-style open floor plan, kitchenette, and a balcony overlooking that very same pool. Few hotel stays in Los Angeles are quite so freighted with history.
4. The Hollywood Museum: Ten Thousand Showbiz Treasures
Dedicated to the history and heritage of Hollywood, the Hollywood Museum houses 10,000 showbiz treasures spanning more than a century of cinema history. Among its many highlights are Max Factor’s world-famous make-up rooms, where Monroe famously became a blonde and Lucille Ball became a redhead.
The museum’s Marilyn Monroe collection is particularly extensive, ranging from personal items and wardrobe pieces to her limousine. The most memorable single artefact is Monroe’s million-dollar honeymoon dress — worn both on her honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio and when she entertained troops in Korea in 1954.
5. TCL Chinese Theatre: Step Into Marilyn’s Footprints
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell were invited to immortalise themselves in cement at the famed Forecourt of the Stars at the TCL Chinese Theatre following the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Their signatures, handprints, and shoe prints remain embedded in the pavement — one of the most tactile and intimate connections to Monroe that any visitor to Hollywood can experience.
Marilyn’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star lies just one block away at 6774 Hollywood Boulevard.
6. Musso & Frank Grill: The Booth Where Hollywood Drank
Opening in 1919, Musso & Frank Grill is one of Hollywood’s oldest and most storied restaurants, a temple to classic steakhouse cooking and famously stiff Martinis. The Back Room, which opened in 1934 as an exclusive private space for the Hollywood elite, counted Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Elizabeth Taylor, and Steve McQueen among its habitués during the 1950s.
The restaurant is guarded today by a famously strict maître d’ — a reminder that some traditions are worth preserving. When booking, ask specifically for Marilyn’s booth.
7. Paramount Studio Tour: Where Marilyn’s Dreams Began
Most of Marilyn’s most celebrated films were shot at the historic Fox Studio Lot in Century City, which is not open to the public. However, the nearby Paramount Studio Tour offers a compelling window into Hollywood’s golden era.
The connection is deeply personal: as a child, living at the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society, young Norma Jeane Mortenson would look out of her window at the water tower of RKO Studios — now Paramount — and dream of stardom. The dream, of course, came true. The studio tour offers both a look behind the scenes of Hollywood history and the chance to witness live productions in progress.
8. The Formosa Café: Where the Stars Dined
Originally opened next to the historic studio lot known variously as the Warner Hollywood Studio, the Samuel Goldwyn Studio, and United Artists Studio, the Formosa Café was billed as the place “where the stars dine” — and the evidence lined its walls, in the form of hundreds of autographed photographs from a galaxy of legends: Monroe, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor among them.
The Formosa reopened in 2019 following a stunning US$2.4-million renovation, which restored its vintage glamour while breathing new life into the space. It remains one of the most atmospheric dining rooms in the city.
9. The Beverly Hills Hotel: The Pink Palace
Marilyn Monroe stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel on several occasions during her career. Her final stay at the “Pink Palace” coincided with the filming of Let’s Make Love (1960), during which Monroe and her then-husband Arthur Miller occupied a bungalow adjacent to her co-star Yves Montand and his wife Simone Signoret — who had just won the Best Actress Oscar for Room at the Top. Monroe and Montand reportedly bonded during the film’s troubled production.
The hotel’s lush grounds, legendary Polo Lounge, and discreet bungalows remain as seductive as ever — and a sighting or two is never entirely out of the question.
10. Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park: Marilyn’s Final Resting Place
For those wishing to pay their respects, Marilyn Monroe is interred in a pink marble crypt (no. 24) at the Corridor of Memories in Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park — a quiet, surprisingly intimate cemetery that is also the final resting place of Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, Farrah Fawcett, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Dean Martin, Roy Orbison, Natalie Wood, and Frank Zappa, among many others.
Hugh Hefner, who died in 2017, was buried beside her. And for 20 years after her death, Monroe’s former husband Joe DiMaggio had a half-dozen red roses delivered to her crypt three times a week — perhaps the most poignant footnote in all of Hollywood history.
