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.
What I find interesting about 50s actress Peggie Castle is that depending on her hair color and pose, she either looks like the girl next door, or else the girl you’re having an affair with — the latter noted by the usual suspects, who say that she was often cast as “the other woman”. A casual scrutiny of her pics will reveal the dichotomy.
Whichever, still alluring.
I have to admit that I’ve always enjoyed Bruce Dern’s little girl Laura in her movies. She’s not pretty in the traditional Hollywood sense (whatever that is), but she’s rather sexy.
And I loved her in Rambling Rose:
Now, at an advanced age (for Hollywood) she gets to play with the hotties:
Laura Dern has admitted she felt ‘so lucky’ to be able to perform a racy sex scene with younger costar Liam Hemsworth in their new movie Lonely Planet.
The romantic drama, which landed on Netflix on October 11, sees Dern’s character Katherine Loewe, a successful and respected writer, travel to a Moroccan resort to finish her latest literary novel – which is where she meets Hemsworth’s character Owen Brophy.
New Wife and I watched Lonely Planet the other night, and it was quite enjoyable despite its obvious unreality (when was a rom-com ever realistic, anyway?), because in no small part Laura’s performance made it credible. (And the “racy sex scene”? Compared to some of her other efforts — e.g. her bedtime activities with Nicholas Cage in Wild At Heart — it was brief, and unlikely to cause Hemsworth’s family much embarrassment.)
Anyway, here’s Laura over the years:
And she’s now 57?
Lovely.
Okay, there was some stupid awards show or other in NYfC (I know, who cares?) but what made it noteworthy is that my two favorite Taco Totties arrived hand-in-hand:
Yup, that’s Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek. There were some other wimmyns there, but none so fetching.
Okay, you may now carry on with what you were doing before.
Some time ago, I said that we could look at Mitzi Gaynor in color on another day. Well, seeing as she recently passed away, this is another day.
Black & white, color, whatever the format, she was lovely.
From Reader Joe Donuts (probably a pseudonym):
“Your wallpaper got me pondering as do many of your posts about what used to be Great Britain. I spent most of my 20 plus years in Uncle Sam’s Traveling Air Circus stationed in East Anglia. Miss it terribly and shudder at what it, and the rest of Europe, has become.
“Fall left here last week. The snow has been on the ground since Monday and is here to stay until late April. I’ve woken to single digit temps the last day or two; they’ll have a negative sign soon enough. Call me odd, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Nor would I. Possibly the strangest thing is that as much as I wouldn’t live pretty much anywhere in the North that I used to (Chicago, New Jersey etc.), I do miss the seasons thereof.
I loved the spring: the way that one day it’s brown and ugly after the snow has melted, and a week later the trees are in full bloom and the grass has somehow recovered after being buried in snow for a few months and is now green again; the joy of a warm, occasionally-hot summer when it feels good to be outside and life just seems more worth living after the February-April dreariness; of the fall, where the trees change from uniform green into a kaleidoscope of many colors and the sweaty heat of summer is replaced with cooler temperatures; and finally, that first snowfall, the beauty of the white covering over everything and the incredible hush that falls after the snow has fallen…
I miss it all, terribly.
And yes, I know that raking the leaves is a pain in the ass, that shoveling snow every morning at 6am in sub-freezing temperatures can become tiresome, and that after the snow has more or less melted away in the late winter/early spring that everything looks dirty and ugly.
As the man said: “Show me paradise and I’ll buy us the tickets.”