The iconic white dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch has sold for a staggering $4.6 million at an auction in Los Angeles.
The dress was part of a collection of film memorabilia which actress Debbie Reynolds had collected over four decades.
Other items of classic film memorabilia sold at the auction were Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra headdress, a Charlie Chaplin bowler hat and the guitar played by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.
Reynolds, 79, was reportedly in tears after the auction on Marilyn Monroe’s Seven Year Itch dress closed.
Auction house Profiles in History had only expected the dress to fetch around $2 million.
The dress was bought by an unidentified phone bidder.
The Seven Year Itch dress wasn’t the only piece of clothing worn by the screen siren that went up for auction. A red sequined dress and feathered headdress Monroe wore for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes also sold for $1.47 million and a saloon girl costume she wore for her role in River of No Return sold for $510,000.
The BBC reported many of the memorabilia items sold at the auction had been given to Reynolds by her close friend Dame Elizabeth Taylor, who died earlier this year. The horse racing outfit worn by Taylor as a child in National Velvet sold for $73,800.
The trademark bowler hat worn by Charlie Chaplin in several films, including The Little Tramp, reached $135,300 while a dress and pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland during the filming of the children’s classic The Wizard of Oz sold for $1.75 million despite not having actually appeared in the film.
Keya Morgan, a collector of memorabilia and author of a book on Monroe, said the auction was “totally crazy, especially in this recession”.
She told CNN Monroe would have been amazed to see her old outfits sell for so much.
Reynolds began collecting props and costumes in 1970 and had amassed around 3,500 items in total.
Before the auction, she said the cost of maintaining them had become too high and that by selling them “I won’t have quite so much responsibility and I can rest a little more”.
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