Category: Classic Beauty

Before Bardot, French cinema audiences had to put up with Martine Carol, the poor things.  How they must have suffered…

Color, you ask?  Okay, just a couple:

Magnifique, non?

Someone else said it best:

“I don’t think any actress in English-speaking cinema of this era had such a variety of love interests as Sylvia Syms. It helped that she was beautiful, of course… that she could act: it’s hard to think of a bad Sylvia Syms performance – sometimes she was miscast, but never bad. She always brought a level of intelligence to her roles along with a sense of fun. And she was highly adept playing “smouldering hot lava of emotion and sensuality under an outwardly straight-laced and sensible facade” that made her – and this is meant with nothing but the greatest respect to the recently departed – sexy as hell.”

So:

 

See what he meant?

The biggest female part, ever, was that of the 50-Foot Woman, and Allison Hayes won the part.  Frankly, it’s easy to see why:

Magnificent.

This lovely woman has often been called “the poor man’s Helen Hunt”.  Myself, I think Helen Hunt is actually the poor man’s Leelee Sobieski.  Why?

What makes Leelee remarkable is that she quit acting at a relatively young age, choosing instead to live a normal life.  Here are the reasons she gave:

“Actors end up going from one role to another with all this energy behind them, and you just become emptier and emptier and emptier — you end up having no real experiences,” she explained. “To cry, you end up drawing on the experiences of another character you played.

“I would cry every time I had to kiss somebody; I couldn’t stomach it. I would think ‘I like this person, so I don’t think they should pay me to kiss them,’ or ‘I don’t like this person, so I don’t want to kiss them. Why is my kiss for sale?’ It made me feel really cheap.

“It might have been acting, but it was as real for me as my first or third kiss, so it was confusing for me.”

Good for her.

What I like most about Kim Novak is not just her astonishing beauty — that alone would get her onto this back porch of mine — but also the fact that she was a wonderful actress, right out of the gate of her first movie.  Award followed award, but because she was also determined not to be screwed by Hollywood, she often fought with the studios who wanted to underpay her and / or play the stereotypical part of The Cute Little Blonde (which she utterly refused to allow).  And she mostly won.

All that, and a brilliant actress as well?  Have mercy.

I’ll show Miss Novak in glorious color at some later date…

It’s kind of a pity that the Great Unwashed really only discovered Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in 1963’s The Graduate because to us classic movie lovers, there had been a whole lot to look at prior:

And yes,as well as that gorgeous face, she had all the rest:

Doing poles before it became slutty:

Then along came Mrs. Robinson, and ol’ Dustin never stood a chance:

And good grief, if ever there was the archetypal Older Woman (what we nowadays coarsely refer to as “MILFs”):

Pretty damn good for an Italian kid from the Bronx, I’d say.