On November 20, 1952, the play The Seven Year Itch by George Axelrod debuted on Broadway at the Fulton Theatre.
The play starred Tom Ewell, as a married man attracted to a gorgeous young neighbor, played by Vanessa Brown.
Ewell was also in the famous 1955 movie version of The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder.
But, in the film, the object of his desire was Marilyn Monroe.
It was one of Monroe’s most memorable roles, and the scene in which her white dress blows up around her shapely legs when she stands on a subway grate has became an iconic cultural image
The play and the movie were both big hits.
Together, they popularized the term “seven year itch” in its marital and sexual sense – that being that previously faithful married people (especially husbands) tend to get an urge, or “itch,” to have an affair after seven years of marriage.
Playwright and screenwriter Axelrod gets credit for creating this current meaning. But he didn’t coin the phrase itself.
Before Axelrod’s play, the term “seven year itch” was a common slang name for a contagious and annoyingly long-lasting bacterial skin disease.
This older use of the term goes back at least to the mid-1800s and was still in the vernacular in the first half of the 20th century.
Thanks to modern antibiotics, the disease and its common name had started to fade away by the mid-Twentieth Century.
Then, thanks to Axelrod’s play and the 1955 movie with Marilyn Monroe, the phrase “seven year itch” was given a new life, albeit with a significantly different meaning.
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