Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Script for The Misfits

From the Personal Files of Marilyn Monroe: An early screenplay for The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller. The script is dated October 28, 1957, and notes on the first page that it is “Based upon the Author’s story ‘The Misfits,’ first published in Esquire magazine of October, 1957.”

Related Collection Artifacts:

• Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Cowgirl Boots from The Misfits
• Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Screen Worn Fur from The Misfits
• Marilyn Monroe’s Personal Script Sides from The Misfits

The Misfits

The Misfits (1961) stands as Marilyn Monroe’s final completed film and one of the most hauntingly human performances in American cinema. Shot on location in the Nevada desert, the film occupies a singular place in her career, quietly blurring the boundary between performance and lived experience.

Written by Arthur Miller, Marilyn’s then husband, The Misfits was conceived as a modern Western but ultimately became something far more intimate. It is a meditation on displacement, tenderness, and moral reckoning in a changing America. Marilyn’s character, Roslyn Taber, is fragile yet deeply empathetic, profoundly affected by cruelty, especially toward those with no voice. The role demands restraint rather than spectacle, and Marilyn meets it with emotional clarity and grace.

Opposite Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, and under the direction of John Huston, Marilyn delivers a performance stripped of artifice. Her voice, gestures, and silences feel natural and unforced, less a performance than a presence. The film’s most unforgettable sequence, the wild horse roundup, becomes its moral center, with Roslyn’s anguish reflecting the film’s larger sense of loss, loss of innocence, loss of compassion, and loss of connection.

Production on The Misfits was famously difficult, marked by illness, exhaustion, and personal strain for nearly everyone involved. Yet the film endures precisely because of that vulnerability. It captures Marilyn not as a manufactured icon, but as the serious actress she struggled to be recognized as.

Released shortly before her death, The Misfits was not intended as a farewell, yet it has become one in retrospect. It remains a quiet and deeply affecting testament to Marilyn Monroe’s artistry and emotional depth. In her final completed role, she did not retreat into myth. She revealed the human being at the center of the legend.