Anna Strasberg, widow of acting guru Lee Strasberg who sold off Marilyn Monroe’s possessions – obituary
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Anna Strasberg, the acting coach who has died aged 84, never met Marilyn Monroe, but ended up making a substantial fortune as the majority heir of her estate, selling the star’s most private possessions – including underwear, bikinis and half-used make-up – and licensing her name on products of dubious merit.
Anna Strasberg was by no means the first person to capitalise on the public’s appetite for an illusion of intimacy with the screen siren, but she was the most successful, and perhaps the most ruthless. The nadir came in 1989, when she fought a fruitless legal battle to wrest the remainder of the Monroe estate from The Anna Freud Centre in north London, which was using the revenue from its quarter-share to help emotionally disturbed children.
Her lawyers claimed her desire was “merely to market Miss Monroe prudently, vetoing proposals that could dilute or sully her name”, and among the proposals she vetoed were greetings cards showing Marilyn Monroe snorting cocaine, with the words “Crystals are a girl’s best friend,” and Japanese lavatory paper featuring the actress’s face on every square.
Merchandise was not allowed to show Marilyn Monroe wearing fur (as she often did, although she was an animal lover) or to allude to her “alleged chemical dependencies”.
Anna Strasberg did not, however, veto a Napa Valley red wine branded as “Marilyn Merlot”, Marilyn-themed slot machines, lottery scratchcards that required the gambler to scratch away the actress’s dress to reveal the prizes, and a Marilyn Monroe novelty telephone, where the skirt flew above her head when the phone rang. According to her business agent, Anna Strasberg’s philosophy was: “Keep making money.” In 1989, annual revenue was $1.1 million; by 2014, it was $17 million.
In an unpublished memoir, Anna Strasberg’s estranged stepdaughter, Susan Strasberg, reportedly wrote: “Marilyn Monroe, who was not so unreasonably paranoid about strangers, now belonged to them.”
Anna Mizrahi was born on April 16 1939 in Caracas, Venezuela, one of five daughters of wealthy Jewish émigrés from Mandatory Palestine, and educated at a Catholic convent. In 1960, she moved to America to work in the Cultural Department of the United Nations, under the supervision of Eleanor Roosevelt, and dabbled in off-off-Broadway theatre.
She was entirely unknown to Marilyn Monroe at the time of her death, in 1962, aged 36. In her will, the actress left “all of my personal effects and clothing” to Lee Strasberg, the acting coach who promulgated “The Method”, “it being my desire that he distribute these, in his sole discretion, among my friends, colleagues and those to whom I am devoted”.
Strasberg also received 75 per cent of her remaining estate; the other 25 per cent went to her psychiatrist, Dr Marianne Kris, “for the furtherance of the work of such psychiatric institutions or groups as she shall elect”. (Dr Kris later left her share to the clinic that became The Anna Freud Centre.)
Marilyn Monroe had been emotionally dependent on Lee Strasberg and his then-wife Paula since 1955. Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio in New York, wanted to show the world that he could transform Hollywood’s most bankable sex goddess into the greatest Method actor of all, by encouraging her to access her appalling reserves of childhood pain to give her performances authenticity.
She called him Daddy (as she did all the men in her life) and surrendered to his genius: “I mustn’t feel this way, Lee will disapprove of me,” she wrote in her diary. Paula became her surrogate mother, and accompanied her on set as coach.
After Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Strasbergs put everything, even her greasy oven mitts, in storage. “Marilyn’s things will ultimately go to a museum,” Lee would say. In 1966, Paula Strasberg died of cancer.
A year later, Anna Mizrahi, dressed in bra and underpants, auditioned for Lee Strasberg’s newly formed Actors Studio West, in Los Angeles. By then, she had appeared in the films Stay Tuned for Terror (1965) and Riot on Sunset Strip (1967), and the television show The Rat Patrol (1966). “I’ve never seen such a sensational pair of legs,” said Strasberg, and urged the panel to take her instead of the then-unknown Jack Nicholson.
They were formally introduced by Paul Newman at a Beverly Hills party. Strasberg’s gambit, to the actress 37 years his junior, was: “Would you like an ice-cream soda?” In 1968, she became his third wife, to the irritation of Joan Crawford, who had proposed to him.
Anna idolised him, and played the part of exotic child-bride to perfection, wearing long, white dresses at his request. She was also a shrewd businesswoman and ran the newly founded Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute so he could concentrate on teaching. He changed his will to leave everything to her and their sons, cutting out his two earlier children.
When he died in 1982, she found herself custodian of two estates: Lee Strasberg’s and Marilyn Monroe’s. She was never in doubt over which flame to keep, and devoted the rest of her life to the glorification of her late husband, while hiring a lawyer to strike a series of licensing deals to milk Monroe-mania.
She also embarked on the first of many protracted lawsuits, successfully fighting Paul Newman and other Actors Studio luminaries for the rights to more than 1,000 tapes of Strasberg’s sessions. She served as artistic director of the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York and Los Angeles, with a London branch added in 1988, and was called “a visionary leader”.
She also taught acting, as a living link with the deceased guru, and advised all her students to acquire the habit of taking a nap, which she called “a short astral projection when you quit yourself and go somewhere else”.
Meanwhile, she was Rottweiler-like in seizing possession through the courts of any personal Marilyn Monroe items that came up for auction, as love letters periodically did. Her lawyers claimed that such private material, quite apart from being the estate’s by right, did not belong “on a public auction block”.
So it was surprising when Anna Strasberg sold over 1,000 lots of Marilyn Monroe’s possessions at Christie’s in 1999, at “The Sale of the Century”, including a dog licence for her white poodle and notes written to herself, one saying “He does not love me.” The dress in which Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr President” to John F Kennedy went for a record-breaking $1.26 million.
Proceeds from the sales of fur and books went, respectively, to the World Wildlife Fund and a literacy charity, and there was a donation to the orphanage where Marilyn Monroe grew up, but Anna Strasberg kept the majority of the $13 million raised.
“I don’t think [Marilyn] would be happy about it,” said Tony Curtis, her Some Like It Hot co-star, who sat in the auction’s front row. “I don’t think it’s very appealing to have your bathrobe and things from your closet generate income for people you never met or knew.” Further auctions followed.
Anna Strasberg also took to court four photographers, famed for their Marilyn photographs, in a complicated legal tangle about whether they needed her permission (and to give her a cut) before they licensed their pictures, enforcing the actress’s post-mortem “right to publicity” (which had been recognised since the 1980s in some US states but not others).
Anna Strasberg lost the case in 2007, and in 2011 sold the estate – which in 2001 had been converted into a corporation, Marilyn Monroe LLC – to a company called Authentic Brands Group for an estimated $20-30 million, but retained a stake. In 2010, she authorised the publication of Fragments, Marilyn Monroe’s poems, intimate notes and letters.
She remained a grande dame of the New York theatrical scene, hosting friends like Al Pacino at gala tables and inhabiting a cluttered 19th-century apartment filled with theatrical memorabilia.
She is survived by her two sons by Lee Strasberg, Adam-Lee and David-Lee.
Anna Strasberg, born April 16 1939, died January 6 2024
