The Misfits: Marilyn Monroe’s final film showed her capacity for playing painfully knotty characters

Written for Monroe by then husband Arthur Miller, the role of Roslyn is contradictory and complex. It signalled a potential new phase in her career

What else can you call it but star quality? It was that – that ineffable, incalculable thing that makes certain actors on film seem almost holy – which made Marilyn Monroe one of the icons of cinema, perhaps the icon. That, coupled with her untimely death, which meant Monroe never grew any older on screen, is surely why she endures even now, 100 years after her birth. Whether performing Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, vamping in Niagara or throwing off sparkling dialogue in Some Like It Hot, Monroe seems to belong up there on the big screen – so much so that you might believe she never actually existed down here with us.

It’s Monroe’s last picture, 1961’s The Misfits, that shows the star was mortal after all. It begins in Reno, where Monroe’s out-of-towner Roslyn gets a quickie divorce from her absentee husband (Kevin McCarthy) before falling in with a group of local oddballs, among them ageing cowpoke Gay Langland (Clark Gable) and buck-drunk bronco rider Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift).