Tag: Classic Women

I’ve never watched a single episode of any daytime soap opera, in any country.  (I think the soapiest I ever got was Dallas, and that only lasted a couple seasons — when J.R. Ewing was shot, I only discovered the identity of the shooter about a week after the reveal, more or less by accident when I overheard some people talking about it like it was the most important thing in the world.)  So whenever I happen upon some totty who is or was a “soap star”, my interest barely flickers.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been a few exquisite of the type, of course — I remember thinking that Susan Lucci, for example, was quite a doll back then.  But one who did get my attention was Deidre Hall, because a long time ago I saw her being interviewed on some celebrity show or other, and not only was she gorgeous, but… freckles, by golly.  (And I think most Readers will be well aware of this particular  fetish  fascination of mine.)  Then quite recently I saw some newspaper article talking about her recently celebrating her 86th birthday (!!!!), but the teaser contained a pic of her much-younger self.  So off I went, along the highways and byways of Teh Intarwebz.

And I wasn’t disappointed.  I’ve confined myself to black & white pics, because most of the color pics are owned by the Usual Suspects, Getty, Alamy, etc., whereas the non-color pics are blessedly free of their foul little watermarks.

And for the freckles:

Of course, the tout ensemble  is excellent:

…but tucked away in some dark corner of said Intarwebz was a whole ‘nother side of Deidre, most probably before she became famous:

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Before Bardot, French cinema audiences had to put up with Martine Carol, the poor things.  How they must have suffered…

Color, you ask?  Okay, just a couple:

Magnifique, non?

Someone else said it best:

“I don’t think any actress in English-speaking cinema of this era had such a variety of love interests as Sylvia Syms. It helped that she was beautiful, of course… that she could act: it’s hard to think of a bad Sylvia Syms performance – sometimes she was miscast, but never bad. She always brought a level of intelligence to her roles along with a sense of fun. And she was highly adept playing “smouldering hot lava of emotion and sensuality under an outwardly straight-laced and sensible facade” that made her – and this is meant with nothing but the greatest respect to the recently departed – sexy as hell.”

So:

See what he meant?

The biggest female part, ever, was that of the 50-Foot Woman, and Allison Hayes won the part.  Frankly, it’s easy to see why:

Magnificent.

This lovely woman has often been called “the poor man’s Helen Hunt”.  Myself, I think Helen Hunt is actually the poor man’s Leelee Sobieski.  Why?

What makes Leelee remarkable is that she quit acting at a relatively young age, choosing instead to live a normal life.  Here are the reasons she gave:

“Actors end up going from one role to another with all this energy behind them, and you just become emptier and emptier and emptier — you end up having no real experiences,” she explained. “To cry, you end up drawing on the experiences of another character you played.

“I would cry every time I had to kiss somebody; I couldn’t stomach it. I would think ‘I like this person, so I don’t think they should pay me to kiss them,’ or ‘I don’t like this person, so I don’t want to kiss them. Why is my kiss for sale?’ It made me feel really cheap.

“It might have been acting, but it was as real for me as my first or third kiss, so it was confusing for me.”

Good for her.