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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

‘Forced to preserve a monument’: how the fate of Marilyn Monroe’s LA home became a legal saga

Marilyn Monroe's Brentwood pool and backyard with a white stucco house, flowering plants, and a person visible.
A photo of Marilyn Monroe's pool and backyard as it was when she owned the Brentwood home in Los Angeles. Photograph: Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Marilyn Monroe is said to have had more than 50 addresses in her lifetime, but only once, in the final months before she died from a drug overdose at the age of 36, did she have a house she could call fully her own.

The Hollywood star, burned out by the failure of her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller and by health problems that prompted a year-long hiatus from acting, bought herself a quintessential hacienda-style Spanish bungalow with a pool at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains in February 1962.

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