Marilyn Monroe poses with stuffed bear, Joe DiMaggio in rare photos

10/12/2010 by Corinne Heller

Rare photos of Marilyn Monroe in the Canadian Rockies from 1953 have been published and feature the late actress and iconic sex symbol posing near a stuffed bear, lying on a bearskin rug, waving while sitting on a ski lift and sitting by baseball player Joe DiMaggio, who would later become her husband.

Look magazine photographer Jonh Vachon took some 200 photos of Monroe, who died unexpectedly in 1962 at age 36, as she recuperated at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel after injuring her ankle during a film shoot of River of No Return. Only two pictures made it into the magazine, which folded in 1971. More than 100 are now featured in the book Marilyn, August 1953, which was released recently.

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper recently published some of the shots of Monroe that did not make the cut and said the photoshoot was the only posed one DiMaggio had agreed to. Monroe and DiMaggio, her second out of three husbands, were married between January and October of 1954.

After Look folded, its archives were turned over to the Library of Congress and Vachon's daughter showed a Smithsonian employee one of the photos while the two collaborated on a collection of her father's work in the 1990s, the newspaper said. The employee and the publisher of Marilyn, August 1953 later dug them up for use in the book.

It was announced last week that Michelle Williams of Dawson's Creek and Brokeback Mountain fame is set to play Marilyn Monroe in the new film My Week With Marilyn, which depicts the actress' 1956 film shoot of the movie The Prince and the Showgirl in London opposite Sir Laurence Olivier, who is portrayed by Kenneth Branagh.