LOS ANGELES, Aug 6: Fans and old friends had warm words on Monday for Marilyn Monroe, still a complex and powerful image 40 years after her death, whose roles on screen and off meant so much to so many.

“This was an amazing talent. She brought herself up from a basically an orphan childhood and made herself a movie star by her own talent,” said Greg Schreiner, president of “Marilyn Remembered”, a group that holds a memorial service on the anniversary of her death each year. Early on the morning of Aug 5, 1962, after a housekeeper found her body stretched across her bed next to a phone left off the hook and an empty bottle of barbiturates, a coroner declared Norma Jean Baker — better known as Marilyn Monroe — dead at the age of 36, calling it a suicide.

For the past 20 years Schreiner and other fans have held a ceremony in the cemetery where Monroe is laid to rest but this year’s 40th anniversary memorial brought out an unprecedented crowd from around this country, and from Spain, France, Germany, Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Australia.

“This service has been the largest ever,” said Jill Adams, president of “For Ever Marilyn.”

“This is the very same chapel where her funeral was held” in 1962, recalled an emotional Leslie Kasperowicz, president of another fan club, “Immortal Marilyn.”

Some 400 admirers of the pop icon came from around the world to pay their respects, cramming the tiny chapel at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park to remember the redheaded girl-next-door turned blonde bombshell who struggled to prove herself as an actress, not just an image.—AFP