Tag: Classic Women

This is quite a resume.  As a professional dancer, she danced all over Europe and at the Folies Bergère  in her hometown of Paris, acted in a couple of French movies… and then Olympe Bradna emigrated to the U.S., getting a seven-year contract at Paramour Pictures — at age 16.  She starred in a few musicals, then graduated to more dramatic roles and proved to be a really good actress.

Then, at age 21 — no doubt to the consternation of studio executives — she got married and quit the movie business forever, preferring to raise her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in California (back when it was still possible to do so).

Almost all the pictures featured below, therefore, are of Olympe while she was still a teenager.  Remarkable.

She passed away at age 92.

She passed away last year at age 92, and we looked at this extraordinary French actress before, but today I want to spend just a little more time regarding Anouk Aimée’s exquisite face:

Words cannot do her justice.

One of my favorite anecdotes about Ann Dvorak was a comment made by one of her male co-stars, who said:  “Whether on-camera or off-camera, she had a way of looking at you that was at once seductive and submissive.”  He went on to add that this made it almost impossible to concentrate when the camera started to roll.

I kinda see his point.

My favorite of her own quotes was explaining how to pronounce her last name:

“My fake name is properly pronounced ‘vor’shack’. The D remains silent.”

Here’s a bit of music from another Dvorak, this time Antonin Dvořák (his real name, but similarly pronounced).

She’s been around for so long, and had such a memorable early career, that it came as quite a shock to me that Winona Ryder is now in her early 50s.  It’s also no surprise that she is almost always better than any of the movies she’s appeared in, with the possible exception of Beetlejuice and The End Of The Innocence.  (Small surprise that she got an Oscar nomination for the latter, too.)

Nevertheless, you will find Winona in the dictionary under two headings:  Gamine Beauty and Haunting Beauty, because she qualifies under both — just at different times in her life.

She is, I think, one of the most beautiful women ever filmed.