Tag: Classic Women

What I like most about Kim Novak is not just her astonishing beauty — that alone would get her onto this back porch of mine — but also the fact that she was a wonderful actress, right out of the gate of her first movie.  Award followed award, but because she was also determined not to be screwed by Hollywood, she often fought with the studios who wanted to underpay her and / or play the stereotypical part of The Cute Little Blonde (which she utterly refused to allow).  And she mostly won.

All that, and a brilliant actress as well?  Have mercy.

I’ll show Miss Novak in glorious color at some later date…

It’s kind of a pity that the Great Unwashed really only discovered Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in 1963’s The Graduate because to us classic movie lovers, there had been a whole lot to look at prior:

And yes,as well as that gorgeous face, she had all the rest:

Doing poles before it became slutty:

Then along came Mrs. Robinson, and ol’ Dustin never stood a chance:

And good grief, if ever there was the archetypal Older Woman (what we nowadays coarsely refer to as “MILFs”):

Pretty damn good for an Italian kid from the Bronx, I’d say.

When you started off as a singer for a big band, got into movies but couldn’t really act;  your whole movie career started when you wore a sarong, and it pretty much became your trademark… how do you break out of it?

Who cares?  Dorothy Lamour did it with Hope and Crosby in The Road To… series, and really, that was all it took.  That, and extraordinary beauty.

(more of this pic at the end…)

And, as promised:

By the way, Dorothy was a staunch Republican and supporter of Ronald Reagan.

So, I ask myself:  how did a Hungarian-born British actress / fashion model / war journalist end up being Anna Thynn, the Dowager Marchioness of Bath and Viscountess Weymouth, who lived for most of her marriage in Paris and not with her husband the Marquess?  And who was initially his mistress while still married to some French guy, and only later married him to produce some heirs?  (We’re not even going to talk about Alex, the 7th Marquess of Bath, who over time surrounded himself with about seventy mistresses (“wifelets”) at the family estate of Longleath.  No wonder Anna went to live in Paris.)

“Wait, what was that middle bit again, Kim?”

Never mind.  Here’s a short pictorial of said Anna Abigail Gyarmathy:

And in color:

Just in case you needed more, our Anna also posed for Penthouse Magazine, but managed to ruthlessly prevent those pics from being re-published after their initial appearance in print.

When she died in 2022, the world became a far less interesting place.

“How did you discover this lovely creature, Kim?”

I saw her in a bit part in the 1969 movie The Bridge At Remagen, as Anna Gaël.