Category: Classic Beauty

Okay, she was first and foremost a ballet dancer (Sadlers Wells Company at age 14!), and only moved to movies later.  Don’t care.  Flame-haired Moira Shearer (Lady Moira to you peasants) was extraordinary.

All class, all the time.

She is quite possibly one of the most sensual women of all time, and I for one am not going to argue with that description of Anouk Aimée.

And she could do classy as well as slatternly:

She was the sexiest of the Sexy 60s era.  Just watch her in the 1966 movie A Man And A Woman, and you’ll see what I see.

Silent movies, Billie Dove:  they go together like a horse and carriage, as the song goes.  And it’s easy to see why.  But first, she started out as a Ziegfeld Girl:

…at age 15, despite not being able to dance.

Then Hollywood came a-calling, and she was signed to a movie contract.  Apparently, someone complained to the studio head that she couldn’t act, either.  Whereupon the studio head said:  “Who cares?  Just look at her!”

You can kinda see his point, I think.

Started off in Italian TV, but her original career goal was to be a sexual psychologist.  At this point, the lines pretty much write themselves…

…if you know what I mean.

A couple years ago, we took a look at Mrs. Clark Gable.  But someone that beautiful and sexy deserves a second look, methinks.

Exquisite.  And not a nude role or explicit love scene, ever.  Didn’t need to.

The best thing you can say about Geraldine Brooks is that she was better than almost every movie she ever played in.  She could hold her own against highly-strung co-starring divas as Joan Crawford and the volcanic Anna Magnani.  Starting at 18 in a starring role in the long-running Broadway play Follow The Girls, she did nearly half of the 288 performances.  Then she got hired by Hollywood to appear in movies, and in the best Hollywood tradition, she was totally undervalued. Only when she quit Hollywood to do Italian movies was she fully appreciated — and when those movies appeared in America, they were bowdlerized beyond recognition.

So… TV, from 1952 she settled for appearing on silly TV shows for another twenty-four years, her performances still always better than the shows themselves.

But enough of that.

Magical.