Marilyn Monroe was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Nachem Malech Mailer, known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker. In a career spanning more than six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Rachel Claire Ward is an English-Australian actress, film director, screenwriter and television director.
Them is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the third in her "Wonderland Quartet" following A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1968) and preceding Wonderland (1971). It was published by Vanguard in 1969 and it won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1970.
Poppy Montgomery is an Australian-American actress. She played FBI agent Samantha Spade on the CBS mystery drama Without a Trace from 2002 to 2009 and played Detective Carrie Wells on the CBS/A&E police drama Unforgettable from 2011 to 2016.
Andrew Dominik is an Australian film director and screenwriter. He has directed the crime film Chopper (2000), the Western drama film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), the neo-noir crime film Killing Them Softly (2012), and the biographical psychological drama Blonde (2022). He has also directed the documentary film One More Time with Feeling (2016) and two episodes of the Netflix series Mindhunter in 2019.
Black Water is a 1992 novella by the American writer and professor Joyce Carol Oates. It is a roman à clef based on the Chappaquiddick incident, in which U.S. senator Ted Kennedy crashed a car and caused the death by drowning of passenger Mary Jo Kopechne. The novella was a 1993 Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction.
Xavier Samuel is an Australian film and theatre actor. He has appeared in leading roles in the feature films Adore, September, Further We Search, Newcastle, The Loved Ones, Frankenstein, A Few Best Men, and played Riley Biers in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and Billy in Spin Out. He also starred as Cass Chaplin in Blonde.
The biographical novel is a genre of novel which provides a fictional account of a contemporary or historical person's life. Like other forms of biographical fiction, details are often trimmed or reimagined to meet the artistic needs of the fictional genre, the novel. These reimagined biographies are sometimes called semi-biographical novels, to distinguish the relative historicity of the work from other biographical novels
American actress Marilyn Monroe's life and persona have been depicted in film, television, music, the arts, and by other celebrities.
The Gravedigger's Daughter is a 2007 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 36th published novel. The novel was based on the life of Oates's grandmother, whose father, a gravedigger settled in rural America, injured his wife, threatened his daughter, and then committed suicide. Oates explained that she decided to write about her family only after her parents died, adding that her "family history was filled with pockets of silence. I had to do a lot of imagining."
A major American icon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has been portrayed, alluded to, and referred to in many media in the popular culture from the 1960s and continuing into the 21st century.
Wonderland is a 1971 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the fourth in her "Wonderland Quartet" following A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969). It was a finalist for the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and it has been called one of the author's best books.
Ana Celia de Armas Caso is a Cuban and Spanish actress. She began her career in Cuba with a leading role in the romantic drama Una rosa de Francia (2006). At the age of 18, she moved to Madrid, Spain, and starred in the popular drama El Internado for six seasons from 2007 to 2010.
Blonde is a 2001 American made-for-television biographical fiction film on the life of Marilyn Monroe, with Australian actress Poppy Montgomery in the lead role. The film was adapted from Joyce Carol Oates's 2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist novel of the same name.
Blonde is a 2022 American biographical psychological drama film written and directed by Andrew Dominik, based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates. The film is a fictionalized take on the life and career of American actress Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana de Armas. The cast also includes Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, and Julianne Nicholson.
The Sacrifice is a 2015 novel by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Set in blighted urban New Jersey in the 1980s, it follows a young Black woman, Sybilla, who is discovered in a degraded condition in an abandoned factory after going missing. When she alleges that she was kidnapped, assaulted, and left for dead by a group of white police officers, her cause is taken up by an ambitious and unscrupulous civil rights activist and his lawyer brother, despite evidence of deceit in her story. The events of the novel are based on the real-life Tawana Brawley case, and takes place in a part of New Jersey still suffering from the aftermath of post-war deindustrialization and the 1967 Newark riots.
Blonde (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film) is the score album composed and produced by Australian musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. It is the soundtrack to the 2022 biographical film Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik. The film, which is based on 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, is a fictionalized take on the life and career of American actress Marilyn Monroe, played by Ana de Armas in the lead. The soundtrack album was released by Lakeshore Records and Invada Records on September 28, 2022.
