Category: Classic Beauty

In the 1930s, Dorothy Flood was considered one of the most beautiful faces in show business — but hey, don’t take my word for it;  judge for yourselves:

   

   

Then, after having spent her teenage years on Broadway, appearing in shows with established stars like Ruby Keeler, she became a Ziegfeld Girl — and met Ziegfeld’s “house” photographer, Alfred Cheney Johnson… and the rest became history.

 

Johnson is said to have remarked that Dorothy Flood was the most beautiful woman he’d ever photographed — and considering who and how many women he’d snapped, that’s no small compliment.

Gorgeous.

One of those 1940s babes, I think Ramsay Ames had an amazing ability to look like other stars of the day such as Rosalind Russell, Lana Turner* and so on.  Or maybe they just all looked alike according to the casting standards of the day.  Whatever, Ramsay’s gorgeous.

Classic, indeed.

She was once described as having “a face like Grace Kelly and a body like Marilyn Monroe”.  I wouldn’t go as far as that, but Rosemarie Bowe was something else.

 

 

Unusually for Hollywood, she was married to only one man — Robert Stack — and she pretty much quit acting when the two kids came along, only going back once they had grown.

Lovely.

We’ve already looked at her sister, but Constance Bennett was nothing to sneeze at, either:

 

And she aged pretty nicely, too. Here she is at 55, five years before her death:

In a world of Nazis, rapacious movie directors and lascivious producers (and it was worse here than in her native Germany), Marlene Dietrich gave the world that famous look, said: “Is dat the best vat you can do to me?  Hah” and proceeded to take the world of show business by storm.

Being a bona fide product of Weimar Germany and Isherwood’s Cabaret Berlin, her sexuality swung both ways and her legs every way you could imagine;  but even with all that, people still adored her.  And so do I.

The problem for most American men, though, is that all they know of Marlene comes from Madeline Kahn’s exquisite parody of her in Blazing Saddles.  But watch any two of her own movies, and you’ll see why this goddess was worshiped.

I recommend Morocco, and of course Blue Angel.