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Unexpected and Surprising Facts About England’s Iconic Queens

Khalid Elhassan February 13, 2022 38 min

27. The Queen and Marilyn Monroe

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

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

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor 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 cross paths 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 royals – 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.