I was never really fan of Elizabeth Taylor’s acting — that squeaky voice drove me crazy — but was there ever a lovelier woman to look at?
Today, we’ll concentrate on the younger Liz:
Next time we’ll do color, just to see those violet eyes in all their glory.
I’ve spoken about Loretta Young and her sister Polly Ann before, and in the intro to the latter, I said the following:
Actor David Niven once described the Young sisters (Polly Ann, Elizabeth and Loretta) thus: “Each one was prettier than the others.”
So if I’ve looked at Loretta and Polly Ann, then where’s Elizabeth Young?
Here she is; only she changed her stage name to Sally Blane. In the early years:
And later on:
Good grief. Small wonder that David Niven was so frequently a guest at the Young sisters’ house, the old dog. Here he is with Loretta:
This one’s named Monica Barbaro (no, never heard of her either), but she plays Jan Baez in the Bob Dylan biopic.
That ol’ Commie Joan Baez can only dream of ever looking this good.
It is difficult to read her biography without sorrow for Diana Dors’s career, which consisted mainly of exploitation, outright abuse (e.g. abortions forced on her by her lovers) and a succession of movie roles promised but never fulfilled.
Most of the above came from her appearance — although it must also be said that she was also a naughty, naughty girl — so let’s see what all the fuss was about.
Let’s look at the tout ensemble now:
We’ll save the color pics for another time.
New Wife and I have a Saturday morning ritual which involves me making us tea and coffee and bringing the laptop to bed, where we read the online news and browse a few websites together.
The first thing we look at is this here website, because she doesn’t have time to read it during the week, so we scroll back while she gets a Whole Week Of Kim in one gulp, so to speak. (And yet she still stays with me, which is a miracle, quite frankly.)
Anyway, our first read this past Saturday was my post about beauty and the differing definitions thereof.
I should point out that New Wife has if anything more conservative tastes than I do, and anything that reeks of “flashy” or “loud” makes her nose turn up in disgust. Needless to say, she thought all the ’68-’72 cars I pictured were “dreadful” and “disgusting” except for the E-type (and even that gets only a begrudging pass from her).
One of the other websites we visit each week is C.W.’s Daily Timewaster, which on this occasion featured this vision of loveliness, a Jaguar Mk II from the early 1960s:
This she pronounced as the most beautiful car ever made, because it was classy (inside and out).
By her terms, of course, it is the most beautiful car ever made — because she thinks that almost all sports cars are “flashy”, and the family saloon car is the sine qua non of automotive desirability.
I would actually agree with her, because as 4-door saloon cars go, the Mark II is undoubtedly exquisite, especially when compared to others of its ilk and era both European and American. (With its 3.4-liter engine, it’s also plenty powerful, which she sniffily dismisses with “If you’re interested in that sort of thing”.)
And in case you’re interested in which sports car she would appreciate were we to win the lottery, it’s this one, the 1964 Mercedes 230SL W113 (“Pagoda”):
Can’t really fault her on that one, either. (I’d prefer the later-model W113 280 SL because MOAR POWAH, but she’s unmoved by that, as we’ve seen before.)