November 20, 2025 – Banff, Alberta — The ISU World Cup in Calgary starts Friday, which allowed a little time to explore, so onto Banff. It was perfect timing as shoulder season meant fewer crowds and reasonable rates. Trying to find a niche story, the Whyte Museum offered a wonderful display of history and highlighted the Hollywood that often filmed in Banff. In 1953, Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe starred in River of No Return. A young photographer, Eddie Hunter of Banff, managed to capture two photos of the 27-year-old blonde bombshell.
Seventy-two years have passed, and Hunter, now 99, still lives in Banff. I sat with him as he remembered the day when a young Marilyn Monroe paused her shopping on Banff Avenue, turned to look over her shoulder, and let the 27-year-old take what would become one of his most treasured photographs.
Speaking softly, Hunter recalled the improbable scenario that led him to cross paths with one of the world’s most recognizable stars.
While filming, Monroe stayed at the Banff Springs Hotel.
“I met Marilyn in 1953. She had come to make a movie and spent quite a while here,” Hunter said. “She was really quite approachable.”
Hunter said he encountered Monroe downtown while she was shopping for her boyfriend.
“She was looking for a gift for Joe DiMaggio,” he said, “She shopped inside JD Anderson’s, a men’s store.”
When Hunter asked for Monroe’s photo, “She said, ‘Could you just wait a little bit?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
When she stepped outside, Hunter lifted his Rolleicord camera.
“It was sort of a quality camera for me at that time… I took a lot of pictures with it,” he said. But remarkably, of Monroe, “I only took two pictures of her. Can you imagine that? Today I would have taken a hundred.”
Hunter’s photo captured Monroe getting into a taxi and looking back at him. He said it was an idea from an article he’d read.
Click HERE to see Eddie Hunter’s photo of Marilyn Monroe
“I wanted her to look like she was walking away… looking over her shoulder,” he said.
Monroe, according to Hunter, was recovering from a minor filming injury and carried a cane.
“She had hurt herself filming… not badly, but she’d taken a few days off,” he said.
The encounter was brief and polite.
“She wasn’t… ‘I haven’t got time for you’ type of thing. She listened to people,” he said. “She was casual. No security. No mobs of people.”
Their goodbye was simple.
“It was just ‘Thanks.’ She was friendly enough that I didn’t feel like I owed her a lot.”
Hunter later sold prints of the photograph locally.
“I made them up for sale… that was a long time ago,” he said.
For having a career in photography, Hunter had only a few photographs. A picture in a frame of family and a black-and-white large print of himself in his younger days as a skier.
Hunter spent most of his career filming ski work and outdoor scenes.
Even at 88, he produced one more film: “I called it my 88th year… I made the film with my daughter and one of her sons who is the best skier in our family.”
Skiing remained a lifelong passion.
“I skied up until a year or two ago… I actually went last year,” he said.
Even into his mid-90s, he was still turning down the slopes: “It’s funny with skiing… all you got to do is get the momentum going and the technology… that ski turns that way.”
An adventuresome career, Hunter also worked on movie sets occasionally, including early Superman productions near Calgary.
“Yeah, I worked on a couple of Superman films… in the mountains west of Calgary,” he said.
Hunter had a challenging time recalling the film shoot for Superman III with Christopher Reeve. But he did remember, “he had an accident didn’t he,” regarding Reeve’s equestrian accident that left him paralyzed.
Asked whether photographing Monroe felt like a turning point, Hunter said, “Yeah… that has to be one of the highlights of my career.”
On a side note:
- The initial photo of Marilyn Monroe that started this story was found in the Banff Trading Post. The store had been in operation 120 years. Inside there was a giant taxidermy grizzly bear and next to it a framed photo of Monroe standing inside the bear’s grasp.
- Another side note, that taxidermy bear had a small patch by its lower left leg. The clerk said the bear used to be outside but was a popular target after bar hours, so it was brought inside and mended. During that mending process, they found the original skeleton of the bear was still inside.
- Onto the Whyte Museum, which had a great archive of Hollywood history including films, photos, and a huge digital archive. Kate, with the archive department, offered a friendly warning about strong copyright on all images of Marilyn Monroe – hence, we’ll offer a link to the images but not the photos themselves.
- Kate mentioned Eddie Hunter had visited the Whyte Museum within the past two weeks, so that led to tracking him down in Banff for an interview. Hunter was very kind and it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment to relive history.
