“Every baby needs a da-da-daddy,” Marilyn Monroe sings in one of her first credited roles, as former burlesque dancer Peggy Martin in 1948’s Ladies of the Chorus. In some ways, this infantilized yet sexualized plea is at the forefront of the portrayal of Monroe and her wounded psyche in Netflix’s Blonde.

As played by Ana de Armas, director Andrew Dominik’s vision of Monroe is one shaped by “mistaken childhood beliefs and trauma,” he told Vanity Fair. Based on the 2000 Pulitzer Prize–shortlisted novel by Joyce Carol Oates, he has called Blonde “a movie for all the unloved children of the world.”

At the film’s beginning, a seven-year-old Norma Jeane Baker (Lily Fisher) is tormented by her alcoholic and mentally unstable mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). She is shown directly threatening her daughter’s life multiple times— nearly drowning her in a bathtub and driving her toward the 1933 Griffith Park fire. As for her father, Gladys hangs a picture of him on the wall and tells Monroe that he’s a Hollywood power player (in real life, Gladys met Monroe’s father when she worked as an RKO film cutter). She even promises that the man will one day retrieve them from poverty. Throughout Blonde, Monroe is plagued both by a missing father figure (she calls both of her husbands “Daddy”) and subconsciously ubiquitous mother.

The real Monroe was only two weeks old when Gladys first dropped her off at a foster home in Hawthorne, California. As the mother of two children—Jackie and Berniece—who had already been taken from her by an ex-husband, Gladys was eager to keep her youngest in her life in some form, according to Biography. She would make frequent visits to Monroe’s foster home, and even keep her for occasional sleepovers. When her daughter was three years old, Gladys would allegedly make a thwarted attempt to break into Monroe’s foster home, placing her daughter in a duffel bag and briefly locking out the foster mother. By age seven, Monroe was back in her birth mother’s care, although as shown in Blonde, her mother would be institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia shortly thereafter.

Monroe spent her childhood in various orphanages and foster homes, where she allegedly faced sexual abuse and emotional distress. Moving in with family friend Grace McKee Goddard at age 11 changed her fate. “It wasn’t till later that I realized how much she had done for me,” Monroe wrote of her “Aunt Grace” in her posthumously published memoir, My Story. “If not for Grace I would have been sent to a state or country institution where there are fewer privileges, such as being allowed to have a Christmas tree or seeing a movie sometimes. I lived in the orphanage only off and on. Most of the time I was placed with a family, who were given five dollars a week for keeping me. I was placed in nine different families before I was able to quit being a legal orphan. I did this at sixteen by getting married.” (Monroe’s only guardian in the film is a neighbor who appears briefly, played by Sara Paxton.) When McKee Goddard and her husband announced their move to West Virginia they offered a then 15-year-old Monroe the choice between marrying James Dougherty, the 21-year-old son of a former neighbor, or returning to the orphanage. She chose marriage. They wed in 1942 and split by 1946.

When it came time to choose a stage name, Norma Jeane chose Monroe, her mother’s maiden name, but that was the only part of her old life she disclosed—at first, anyway. “I used to tell lies in my interviews—chiefly about my mother and father,” Monroe wrote in My Story. “I’d say she was dead—and he was somewhere in Europe. I lied because I was ashamed to have the world know my mother was in a mental institution—and that I had been born ‘out of wedlock’ and never heard my illegal father’s voice.”

Twentieth Century Fox reinforced this narrative, branding their newest star as an orphan who was discovered while babysitting for a talent scout. Monroe even posed for photos changing diapers and reading to children for a 1947 story headlined “Pretty Sitter Sittin’ Pretty.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, five different women would claim to be Monroe’s birth mother but a gossip columnist identified Gladys. “The poor woman was telling people she was Marilyn Monroe’s mother, and no one believed her,” Monroe biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli told THR. “Over the years, the two of them did slowly develop a relationship.” When Monroe died in 1962, she left her mother $5,000 a year from a $100,000 trust fund.

As for her father, who was identified in 2022 through DNA testing to be Charles Stanley Gifford, in her book Monroe recalled first seeing a lone photo of him when she was a child. She would subsequently gaze upon a photo of Clark Gable, with whom she would later work in 1961’s The Misfits, “because he looked like my father—especially the way he wore his hat and mustache.” Monroe wrote, “Years later I found out what his name was, and many other things about him—how he used to live in the same apartment building where my mother lived, how they fell in love, and how he walked off and left her while I was getting born—without ever seeing me.” She added, “The strange thing was that everything I heard about him made me feel warmer toward him. The night I met his picture I dreamed of it when I fell asleep. And I dreamed of it a thousand times afterward.”

In Blonde, Monroe is shown corresponding with a man who falsely claims to be her father. Her real father also rebuffed his daughter’s attempt at contact, wrote author Charles Casillo in 2018’s Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon. “Look, I’m married and I have a family,” Gifford allegedly said when contacted in 1952. “I don’t have anything to say to you. Call my lawyer.” Monroe was reportedly devastated. “She put all her hopes in the men she was with,” Casillo wrote. “It’s what she was always looking for—this is my father, this is my savior. She was a lady born into turmoil, and she spent the rest of her life looking to be saved.”

Monroe’s childhood trauma would impact her own desire to start a family, which emerges as a major theme in Blonde. “Having a child. That’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child,” she reportedly told Lawrence Schiller, who photographed Monroe in her final months. “Whenever it came close, my body said no and I lost the baby.” Schiller said, “I remember her talking about being afraid that she’d wind up like her mother, who had been in and out of mental institutions her whole life. And I could see how that frightened her.”

After her painful divorce from Arthur Miller in 1961, Monroe’s inner fears would be realized when she was admitted to Payne Whitney’s psychiatric ward. What was meant to be “a prescribed rest cure” turned into a three-day nightmare in which Monroe was kept in a locked and padded room against her will. In March 1961, she wrote a letter to Dr. Ralph Greenson, her psychiatrist, detailing the experience: “The inhumanity there I found archaic…everything was under lock and key…the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time, also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients.”

But there’s evidence that Monroe’s stance on motherhood shifted throughout her life—no talking fetus required. An idea that once “stood my hair on end,” because “I could only see it as myself, another Norma Jean in an orphanage,” she wrote in My Story, became “one of the things I dream of.” Monroe continued, “She won’t be any Norma Jean now. And I know how I’ll bring her up—without lies.”