Category: Classic Beauty

As promised last week, here’s Marisa Mell in glorious color:

Next week there’ll be another one of those fortuitous discoveries, this time from Sweden.

I found out about Austrian actress Marisa Mell in a roundabout sort of way.  I was watching one of those silly “10 Movies That People Have Foregotten”-kidd of video on EeeewChooob, when suddenly I saw a woman of outstanding beauty appear for a few seconds.  So of course I looked up the cast of said movie, and there she was (and here she is):

…and even as a blonde:

Next week, we’ll look at Marisa in color.  Try to contain yourselves.

I can’t believe that I’ve never featured German hottie Hildegard Knef before.  Some salient facts about her:  in the dying days of WWII she disguised herself as a man and joined the German Wehrmacht  so she could fight the Russians alongside her lover;  she was the first woman to appear nude in a German-made film;  and after her acting career ended in the 1960s, at age 40 she went on to become a singer-songwriter and sold over 3 million records.

Just to backtrack a little:  her nude scene in Die Sünderin (The Sinner) caused all sorts of rumpus in Germany, to which she responded that considering that Germany had been responsible for Auschwitz, they shouldn’t get all upset about a nude scene (okay, stop laughing now:  she had a point).  Then there was the fact of her romance with a Nazi, which caused her all sorts of problems with the wokisti of the time, and which she explained away with the comment that she was only eighteen, and sometimes girls do stupid things.

Oh, and did I mention that she survived imprisonment in a Russian POW camp, back in 1945?

I wish I’d met her.

Here she’s singing Ich habe’ noch einen Koffer in Berlin, and in English, In This Old Town (both of which she wrote herself).  What a voice.

And what a woman.

I remember that when I first saw Stana Katic appear in the silly ABC-TV crime series Castle, I actually gasped at how beautiful she was — and still is, by the way.

And I’m sorry, but…

…those damn Balkan-bred women do it to me every time.

Proving that not all Austrians are short, dark-haired dictators with a sense of destiny, Senta Berger is simply exquisite:

Oh… did somebody say “color”?

Yeah, Hitler would have hated her too… because she’s Jewish.