26-foot-tall Marilyn statue unveiled in Chicago

A 26-foot-tall sculpture of Marilyn Monroe in her famous pose from the film 'The Seven Year Itch' has been unveiled on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.

In the film, a draft catches Monroe’s dress as she passes over a grate.

Many in the crowd that descended on the plaza throughout the day – including a tuxedo-clad wedding party – wasted little time positioning themselves under the movie star’s dress to catch a subway-level view and take pictures with their mobile phone cameras.

Some of those who took pictures of the sculpture, called 'Forever Marilyn', were surprised when they came around the side and back of the sculpture and saw honest-to-goodness lace panties on the movie star.

The film scene and photographs taken from it left much more to the imagination than artist Seward Johnson’s sculpture.

“I would have expected to see something flat there, and we wouldn’t see her undergarments,” said Trisha Feely, 41, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. “It’s a little intrusive.”

“It reveals what everybody was always thinking,” said her husband, Terry Feely, 42.

The actual white dress worn by Monroe in the scene from director Billy Wilder’s 1955 film that helped make her a screen legend sold for $4.6m at an auction last month of Hollywood costumes and props collected by film star Debbie Reynolds.

“Thank God, she has panties,” said Wanda Taylor, voicing the relief of a mother who wouldn’t have to spend the next several hours answering questions from her nine-year-old son, Kendall Sculfield.

“They’re clean and white, so I’m happy.”

Monroe’s ex-husband, baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was reported to have been upset during the filming of the scene in 1954, and the couple divorced a few months later.