Beauty – Page 2 – Splendid Isolation

Classic Beauty: Hildegard Knef

November 23, 2025 Kim du Toit Classic Beauty

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.

Random Totty

November 19, 2025 Kim du Toit Gratuitous Chick Pics

Because it’s my birfday, I’m going to indulge myself with today’s totty, and feature an actual totty: Brianna Beach. She’s a one-time model and more recently an actress in, shall we say, a more dubious genre (feel free to find yer own links, ya pervos). Here she is as a youngin:

Modern Classic Beauty: Stana Katic

November 16, 2025 Kim du Toit Classic Beauty

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.

Random Totty

November 12, 2025 Kim du Toit Gratuitous Chick Pics

Apparently Brooks Nader was a Sports Illustrated (who?) swimsuit model, then did something else of equal significance. Whatever.

Modern Classic Beauty: Caroline Vreeland

November 9, 2025 Kim du Toit Gratuitous Chick Pics

Once better known as the great-grandaughter of the formidable fashion doyen and magazine editor Diane Vreeland, young Caroline is of a different type altogether, and quite worthy of appreciation in her own right.

…and she doesn’t seem to be all that shy, either:

Beauty As The Shape Of Joy

November 8, 2025 Kim du Toit Beauty

Keats once wrote: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, and he was quite right.

Here’s a piece from Jamie Wilson at PJMedia, and she has the right of it too:

Our exterior world isn’t harsh or ugly, not like the concrete fortresses of Brutalism or the boxy little cars of the Eastern Bloc, but neither is it beautiful. It is merely acceptable.

And beauty matters. It’s not decoration, it’s expression, a way of saying that life means something, that creation itself is worthy of reverence.

Read the whole thing. It could have been written by me — especially the parts about cars and architecture — except that her article contains no anger or cursing.

It’s a delight, and thankee to her hubby Clark for sending it to me.