Category: Classic Beauty

No Italian, she, but a Pennsylvania girl with a very American name (Marie Katherine Stewart).  Because she looked, in the words of a contemporary critic, “like a porcelain doll” with her flawless complexion, Marie Doro was most often cast as a minor pretty-girly-type, although it should be known that offstage and -screen she had a formidable intellect.

Here’s an expertly-colorized pic of her which I think shows what she might have looked like in real life:

Exquisite.

Perhaps because of her intellect, she got sick of Hollywood and all its nonsense, and retired to become something of a religious recluse.  In earlier times, she might have become a nun.

But the saddest of all is that almost all — perhaps indeed all — of her movies have been lost.

As much a stage actress — perhaps more so — as a movie star, Maude Fealey was one of those women who distinguished themselves not so much for their acting but for what they did for the business after their careers were over.

Not that she wasn’t lovely, though:

I just wish we could have seen her smile… but I can’t find any such pics of her, except perhaps this one:

…which just hints at it.

I’ve enjoyed looking at this Polish beauty for many years now, ever since I first saw her in the Gorky Park  movie.

Now that last pic gives a hint of, but does not do justice to her most striking feature:  those ice-blue eyes:

Not that the rest isn’t wonderful too:

Stunning.

She was a Ziegfeld girl in her late teens, became a silent movie star at 19, made an effortless transition to the talkies, was a rival to “It Girl” Clara Bow, starred in movies which outgrossed actresses like Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo, and when asked to smoke a cigarette in a movie at age 23, had to be shown how to do it.  Then she quit Hollywood because she felt like it and learned how to fly a plane.

All that, and beauty.  Here’s Billie Dove:

Did I mention that she was a redhead?

Born in Yugoslavia (now Croatia), Silvija Košćina moved over to Italy, where she became Sylva Koscina and an actress.  She was, at the time, Italy’s answer to France’s Brigitte Bardot, but I always thought she was a lot classier than the French totty.

I saw her in some forgettable movie long ago, and developed an insane pre-teen crush on her.  I’m happy to say that with advancing age, nothing has changed.

Here she is in black & white:

Like last week’s Classic, Madeline Smith, I’ll defer Sylva’s color pics to a later date.

Brit beauty Madeline Smith started off as a model, became an actress, starred in a few horror movies from Hammer Films, became a Bond girl and when she became a mother, more or less quit acting to look after her daughter.  And good for her.

Fortunately, there’s pictorial history, first in black-and-white (mostly from her modeling days):

…and come to think of it, we can look at her in color some other time.

What an exquisite creature.