Friedman, who went on to marry a doctor in 1956, said the kiss did not go for long.
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Friedman will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to her husband.
Friedman was a 21-year-old dental assistant, out in Times Square when news of the war’s end broke.
Attempts to solve the mystery around the true identities of the couple also included Life Magazine issuing a plea for the couple involved in the photograph to come forward in 1980, receiving multiple claims.
Yet the identity of its subjects? a dark-suited sailor and a woman in a white nurses outfit captured in what seemed to be mid-embrace amid a celebration in Times Square on V-J Day? has always been debated.
You might think Mr Mendonsa’s date Rita Petry was unimpressed by his actions – but she can’t have been too upset, because years later she became his wife. She left her office and headed to nearby Times Square to see about some commotion, which turned out to be a crowd reveling in Japan’s capitulation and the end of World War II. Well, the minute I saw the nurse, instinctively I walked over and I grabbed and I kissed her, and I thought nothing of it. He had been grateful to nurses since May 11 of the same year, when kamikaze planes hit his aircraft carrier, and he watched nurses from a hospital ship arrive to tenderly care for the wounded.
Friedman did not shy away from the photo or her role in it, her son said, adding that he said he believed she understood the argument that it was an assault but did not necessarily view it that way.
As a young woman, she became involved in the NY theater scene, meeting and befriending actors such as Harry Belafonte and Rod Steiger. That was the first time they formally met.
The Kiss became Eisenstaedt’s most iconic photo. American daily “The New York Times” at that time had reported the news using this photograph which had captured a defining moment of the 20th century.
Eisenstaedt, himself a Jewish refugee, was already well known.
It’s one of the most passionate moments ever caught on camera.
The guy’s name was George Mendosa, Friedman later learned. She had arrived with her sisters to the U.S. at the age of 15.
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“(But) she didn’t assign any bad motives to George in that circumstance, that situation, that time”.
