She was the last actress to dance onscreen with Fred Astaire, had an opera-trained soprano voice (which she used on Broadway) and starred in many movies and TV series over the years. None of which compares to the beauty of Anne Jeffreys:
Imagine finding this little present under the Christmas tree:
And she didn’t get any uglier as she got older, either:
Just wonderful.
I have written before of my confusion between UK TV totties Kate Silverton and Natasha Kaplinsky, and I see that the latter has just “astounded” people by the fact that at her recent 52nd birthday, she seems not to have aged one bit. So below are some examples of Natasha taken over the years, and you can form your own opinion.
I do believe that under the dictionary heading of “yummy mummy” you’ll find her picture.
From The Divine Sarah:
…and to prove the point, this intriguing pic was sent to me by a Reader, asking if Ziegfeld Girl Wanda Stevenson might be worthy of a mention:
Why yes, indeed she is:
And my favorite:
No Italian, she, but a Pennsylvania girl with a very American name (Marie Katherine Stewart). Because she looked, in the words of a contemporary critic, “like a porcelain doll” with her flawless complexion, Marie Doro was most often cast as a minor pretty-girly-type, although it should be known that offstage and -screen she had a formidable intellect.
Here’s an expertly-colorized pic of her which I think shows what she might have looked like in real life:
Exquisite.
Perhaps because of her intellect, she got sick of Hollywood and all its nonsense, and retired to become something of a religious recluse. In earlier times, she might have become a nun.
But the saddest of all is that almost all — perhaps indeed all — of her movies have been lost.
Never heard of actress Laura Benanti before (probably because she’s mostly a stage actress), but yowzer:
Not bad for 45, eh?
As much a stage actress — perhaps more so — as a movie star, Maude Fealey was one of those women who distinguished themselves not so much for their acting but for what they did for the business after their careers were over.
Not that she wasn’t lovely, though:
I just wish we could have seen her smile… but I can’t find any such pics of her, except perhaps this one:
…which just hints at it.