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.
Category: Classic Beauty
Classic Modern Beauty: Leelee Sobieski
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.
Classic Modern Beauty: Kim Novak
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…
Classic Beauty: Anne Bancroft
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.
Classic Beauty: Melina Mercouri
I always worshipped Greek actress Melina Mercouri, ever since I saw her in the brilliant 1960 movie Never On Sunday. I have no idea how I got to see it during that year, being only six years old, but my memory is watching it at the drive-in theater while my parents snored on the front seat of the car. The subject matter and storyline would have horrified my mother, had she been awake: the promiscuous prostitute who was being swayed from her debauched life by some goody-two shoes American, with loud and sometimes violent opposition.
I didn’t understand any of it, of course, being only six years old.
But I fell in love with Melina’s character: her blonde hair, her huge, flashing eyes, that wide, sensuous mouth and her fiery spirit. (I adore Italian actress Anna Magnani for precisely the same reasons.)
The thing is that Melina wasn’t really acting. When the “colonels” came to power in Greece, overthrowing the elected government of the time, she went crazy in attacking them. And when they revoked her Greek citizenship, her response was classic: “I was born a Greek and I will die a Greek. They were born fascists and they will die fascists.”
Then after sanity prevailed and democracy returned to Greece [irony alert], she was made Minister of Culture — the first woman in male-dominated Greek politics ever to reach Cabinet rank. She stayed in that position for eight years, most probably because by then she was an icon, and everybody was probably too afraid to oppose her.
And now on with the show:
Color? Of course:
And here she is, going Full Melina:
Magnificent. And scary. And, of course, sexy as all hell.
Classic Beauty: Dorothy Lamour
When you started off as a singer for a big band, got into movies but couldn’t really act; your whole movie career started when you wore a sarong, and it pretty much became your trademark… how do you break out of it?
Who cares? Dorothy Lamour did it with Hope and Crosby in The Road To… series, and really, that was all it took. That, and extraordinary beauty.
(more of this pic at the end…)
And, as promised:
By the way, Dorothy was a staunch Republican and supporter of Ronald Reagan.