It took just one photoshoot for a star to be created. ‘When she first walked into my bungalow, it was as if a miracle had happened to me,’ wrote photographer Andre de Dienes in 1945. ‘Norma Jeane seemed to me like an angel. An earthly sexy-looking angel! Sent expressly to me!’

Then 19 years old, Marilyn Monroe was working in munitions factory during World War Two when she signed up with the Blue Book modelling agency, and it wasn’t long before she was given her first professional assignment: the photographer needed a model who would be willing to pose nude, and the young Norma Jeane Baker was put forward.

Although lauded as an actress as well as a model, it was through the camera that Monroe truly came alive. She died when she was just 36 years old, but in her short life she created some of the world’s most enduring and captivating images.

In late December last year, New York auction house Christie’s released the private Constantiner Collection of Photographs, which included the world’s largest set of Monroe images, alongside shots of other celebrity legends such as James Dean, Kate Moss and Madonna. The Monroe collection charts the siren’s life, from obscurity to superstardom, from that first job with de Dienes right up until The Last Sitting, Monroe’s infamous final photoshoot, taken just a few weeks before her untimely and mysterious death in 1962.

Born Norma Jeane Baker in 1926, Monroe’s beginnings foreshadowed the life of stardom ahead of her. An illegitimate child to an unstable single mother, Monroe grew up in orphanages and foster homes, shunted from one family to the next until she moved in with her first husband when she was 17 years old. But from these humble beginnings, an icon was born.

Far from being the ‘ditsy’ character she often portrayed in films, Monroe was always acutely aware of the public’s expectation of her and actively promoted her image. As renowned celebrity portrait photographer Cecil Beaton said: ‘She has rocketed from obscurity to become our post-war sex symbol – the Pinup Girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight.’

The results of an afternoon spent with Beaton in 1956 were included in the Christie’s Constantiner Collection. By this stage of Monroe’s career, the star had become known for being tardy and unreliable to work with. The shoot was one Beaton had tried to arrange for three months, and Monroe arrived more than an hour late to the New York Ambassador Hotel where they were to work. Despite the inauspicious beginning, the results were some of Monroe’s favourite photographs of herself, lounging on a couch and posing beatifically under a white shawl with a songbird perched on her finger. ‘She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps onto the sofa,’ recorded Beaton of the experience. ‘It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance. It will probably end in tears.’