In 1932, a platinum-haired British actress named Peg Entwistle jumped to her death from the Hollywood sign. Figuratively speaking, many other broken-hearted blondes have followed since. At the Venice Film Festival this year, jury president and writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal premiered a new short about Marilyn Monroe called  a curious title, apparently drawn from a remark made by a movie executive about Monroe’s three-dimensional onscreen presence, which suggests at once a sexed-up thriller, and a piece of body-horror. “Flesh” like meat, a bloody thing to be consumed; “impact” like a car-crash, or a body making contact with the ground after dropping fifty feet. Monroe may be the most famous woman to have made that metaphorical leap from the Hollywood sign to certain doom: the tragic blonde to end all tragic blondes, dead from an overdose at just thirty-six. She came from nothing, and through stardom became something to everyone: an image to silkscreen on a canvas, an American legend. Often misunderstood, she dreamed of being perceived as a great actress instead of as a pin-up. She a great actress, as it happened, and this greatness only made her staggering beauty – her impactful, glorious fleshiness – more burdensome than ever. One can easily picture her in Entwistle’s place: mid-air, her white hair gleaming in the darkness like a plummeting star.

Marilyn Monroe posing for a publicity still for in 1952.

“If you’re going to be two-faced,” Monroe is supposed to have said, “at least make one of them pretty.” If you hope to be adored, it might also be wise to make both selves blonde. depicts two Marilyns – an imagined older version, played by Ellen Burstyn, who presents us with a vision of the actress if she’d lived, and Marilyn as we know her, as played by Dakota Johnson. Lean, brunette, and sardonic, it is difficult to think of an actress who is less Monroe-like than the laid-back Johnson, a woman honed for stardom like a thoroughbred through two generations of Hollywood royalty. (She is the granddaughter and daughter, respectively, of two also-iconic movie blondes: Tippi Hedren, and Melanie Griffith.) The first, discarded plan had been to close the obvious gap between Johnson and Monroe “using licensable AI, training it off of Marilyn Monroe films that we had licensed,” Gyllenhaal told . “The idea,” she continued, “was that we…put [Monroe’s] face on Dakota’s face.” The thought of Monroe’s features being projected onto those of someone else by an unfeeling machine is unsettling, but apt: the most alive-seeming girl in the world, long since dead, has been resurrected over and over. Innumerable contemporary starlets have located themselves in her image, as if “Marilyn Monroe” were a star sign. Think of Anna Nicole Smith, claiming to be her long-lost daughter; Lindsay Lohan repeating her very last shoot with Bert Stern; Megan Fox getting Monroe’s face tattooed on her forearm. That these women knew exactly how the story ended proves that even death itself is no match for the winning trifecta of beauty, fame and platinum hair, which taken altogether are enough to stoke a fatal kind of masochism.

Flowers outside of Kensington Palace following Diana’s death.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Alamy Stock Photo

Why do we love sad blondes? Perhaps because their misery is so telegenic. “Blondes make the best victims,” Dakota Johnson’s grandmother’s director Alfred Hitchcock once suggested. “They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.” His use of the word “virgin” is telling: the blonde, whose perceived stainlessness is bound up in problematic ideas about whiteness and purity, serves double duty in the popular consciousness as both a flaxen-haired naïf, and a sex-symbol. Though Monroe is arguably the -tragic-blonde, there has rarely been a better articulation of their status than a 1997 correction issued by , the day Princess Diana was killed in a vehicular collision: “We apologise for the page-one headline ‘Di goes sex mad’, which is still on the stands at some locations. It is currently being replaced with a special 72-page tribute issue: ‘A farewell to the Princess we all loved.’” To be transformed from a sex-mad slut into a Princess that everyone loved, Diana only had to die, crossing over from tabloid fodder to canonisation. It helps, of course, when famous women are frozen in youth, their lives cut short at the height of their loveliness. Images of Diana will always depict her as a doe-eyed twenty- or thirty-something; a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, , seeks to reveal something of the true Marilyn on the centenary of her birth, but remains a dazzling showcase for her star power nonetheless.

John F Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in 1996.

New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images

When the first production images from Ryan Murphy’s series were released, showing the actress Sarah Pidgeon in costume as the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, no aspect was more raked over than the shade of her hair. “It’s too ashy, it’s too white, it’s burnt,” Bessette Kennedy’s real-life colourist griped to . “It should be darker underneath, medium in the middle and bright in the front. Like you were a kid on the beach laying on a towel.” The last part of this quote is rich enough to be a thesis in itself: the invitation to projection contained within that “you”; the nostalgic invocation of childhood, harkening back to a more innocent time – perhaps a time before Bessette Kennedy, then thirty-three, fell to earth in that plane. Pidgeon’s look was swiftly overhauled. Biopics are made every year, but to fuck up the image of a figure like this – a timeless icon of soignée glamour – would have been beyond the (ashy, white, burnt) pale. “In the end,” Gyllenhaal told about her experiment with AI, “I threw it away because what was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive.” We continue to be struck by how moving and alive Monroe was, even if we forget the human part. Maybe the most tender way to see our need to reanimate such women in art and entertainment is as a reflection of our burning to desire to have them back – to convince ourselves, even, that they never really left.