Timeless shots of a movie icon

SHE is the ultimate 20th century icon. With her platinum blonde hair, trademark red lips and hourglass curves, Marilyn Monroe captured the hearts and minds of the world in the 50s.

As a result her face and body are perhaps the most photographed in history. Lensmen queued up to be allowed to try to capture the "real" Marilyn, as infatuated as movie fans, husbands, lovers and even Presidents, with the actress who started life as plain Norma-Jean Baker.

From the pictures of a naked Marilyn published in Playboy, with her long, naturally red hair spilling over a velvet cloth, to the sparkling blonde curls and white dress blowing round her thighs in The Seven Year Itch, almost every image of her has become a classic photograph.

And now, Edinburgh is set to play host to a collection of rare Monroe pictures, some never before seen in public, as the Capital is the only Scottish venue at the end of a world tour.

Timeless Beauty features portraits of the Holywood icon in a variety of poses and moods. And the photographs are signed works by the leading photographers of that time - George Barris, Bert Stern, Tom Kelley, Milton Green and Lazlo Willinger.

Two colour pictures of an apparently nude Marilyn, wearing just a necklace, have never been made public before. The legendary 60s advertising and fashion photographer, Bert Stern, kept them in his own collection. There are also three rare black and white images by Stern showing Marilyn in different guises - looking sultry in a trilby hat, serious as she gazes directly into the lens and then as if she’d just got out of bed complete with tousled hair.

But perhaps the one which may generate the most interest is that snapped by a Japanese Pan Am airline steward, Kashio Aoki, when he took pictures of Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio as they landed in Japan in February 1954 on honeymoon. It was her second marriage, and two weeks later when the newlyweds were leaving, Aoki presented them with the developed photographs, which Monroe duly signed.

There are two other rarities - one by Andre de Dienes of a dark haired Marilyn giving a "come hither" stare, and another by Milton Greene of the actress in a gypsy costume.

The whole collection has been brought to Edinburgh from the Andrew Weiss Gallery in Los Angeles by Jonathan Poole, who runs the Compton Cassey Gallery in Cheltenham. Edinburgh’s Dome restaurant in George Street is the final stop for the collection before it returns to the States.

The collection also includes the infamous Red Velvet series of photographs taken by Tom Kelly in 1949. These fully nude pictures of Marilyn first appeared as a pin-up calendar and then in the 1952 debut issue of Playboy Magazine, becoming a milestone in the perception of the human body as an work of art. In addition, there are her first photographs, taken by Lazlo Willinger, and the last taken of her, which were snapped by George Barris.

Of course, the fact that she died at the age of 36 in 1962 is why Marilyn’s image has never faded.

• The Timeless Beauty exhibition is on at The Dome, George Street, from Monday, July 21 to July 26. Signed limited edition prints of the majority of the images will be available for sale with prices ranging from £175 to £3000.