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A Tale of Two Elizabeths: Two Queens Who Rewrote History

Khalid Elhassan September 15, 2022 39 min

When Queen Elizabeth II Met a Famous Hollywood Queen

Elizabeth - Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe at a movie premiere — Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe at a movie premiere. The Houston Chronicle

Queen Elizabeth II demonstrated that she took her coronation oath seriously. She exhibited a strong commitment to her civic and religious duties in her decades on the throne. The royal family around her might have often been engulfed in scandals and provided the tabloids with steady fodder for decades on end. However, the queen has been not only scandal-free, but seemingly free of any hint of frivolity. While the queen was a cultural icon, she was worlds apart from another cultural icon born the same year as Her Majesty, in 1926: Marilyn Monroe.

Queen Elizabeth was born on April 21^st of that year, while Marilyn was born about six weeks later, on June 1^st. The two icons lived worlds apart, one in Hollywood, the other in Buckingham Palace. However, the two did meet once on common ground, when the monarch met the movie star at the London premiere of the Battle of the River Platte. Both women were thirty-years-old at the time, when Monroe waited in a line of guests to shake the queen’s hand. It was the only time those two different types of royalty – a Hollywood queen and a real life one – met.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.