Marilyn Monroe’s biological father is now widely accepted to have been Charles Stanley Gifford , a co-worker of her mother in the 1920s, confirmed decades later through DNA testing in 2022.

Who Was Marilyn Monroe’s Father?

Marilyn was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles in 1926 to her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, who was unmarried at the time. Her birth certificate listed Martin Edward Mortenson (also written Mortensen), Gladys’s estranged husband, as her father, but biographers had long doubted he was her biological parent.

The Gifford DNA Confirmation

Researchers and filmmakers investigating her parentage focused on Charles Stanley Gifford, a supervisor who worked with Gladys at a film company in the mid‑1920s. In 2022, a documentary team used DNA from a preserved strand of Monroe’s hair and compared it with DNA from one of Gifford’s descendants, concluding that Gifford was indeed her biological father.

  • Gifford had an affair with Gladys around 1925, shortly before Marilyn’s birth.
  • The genetic match between Monroe’s DNA and that of a Gifford descendant provided scientific backing to what many biographers had already suspected.

What Marilyn Was Told

Accounts suggest Monroe’s mother once showed her a framed photograph of Gifford and told her, “This is your father,” but he never publicly acknowledged her. For much of Monroe’s life, her father’s identity remained a painful mystery that she tried to unravel, and only modern DNA techniques finally settled the question long after her death.

TL;DR: Although Marilyn Monroe’s birth certificate named Martin Edward Mortenson, modern DNA analysis has confirmed that her biological father was Charles Stanley Gifford.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.