Classic Beauty: Lana Turner

After her very first movie role (in a bit part) at the age of 15, Lana Turner’s appearance in a sweater caused a critic to write that she “made a sweater look like something Cleopatra was saving for the next visiting Caesar”, and the nickname of “Sweater Girl” stuck.  And in the following decades, it was hard to find a movie that didn’t include her in the cast.  Here’s the look that started it all:

And the rest:

I think the reason for her popularity is understandable.

Top-Class Totty

While clearing out some closets (digitally speaking) I came across these pics.  I must have wanted to use them in a post about how Brit TV women are much sexier than their American counterparts, or maybe it was just another Bucket List, who knows?  Anyway, here they are:

Charlotte Hawkins

Claudia Winkelman

Kate Silverton

Nigella Lawson

Victoria Coren-Mitchell

Honestly, I have no recollection as to why I would have saved these pics.

Classic Beauty: Rhonda Fleming

When your first serious movie role is that of a nymphomaniac at age 22, and you have to look the word up in the dictionary… that’s Rhonda Fleming for you.

And y’all know how much I love redheads.

It’s a good thing she came along when color became the thing in movies, or else we’d have lost that lovely red hair, and had to make do with pics like this:

Just… exquisite.

Classic Beauty: Danielle Derrieux

Here’s an actress we Murkins are mostly unaware of.  But in her native France she was, and remains, a national treasure:  Danielle Derrieux lived to over 100, and acted in well over a hundred movies.  She survived both WWII and one-time hsband Porfirio Rubirosa’s  (reputedly) elephantine manhood.  A hero(ine) of France indeed.  And as for her looks:

Oh yes, she had sensational legs.

And she looked just fine in color, too:

Call her France’s answer to Grace Kelly or Deborah Kerr, if you want;  I certainly wouldn’t argue the point.

Classic Beauty: Tallulah Bankhead

This post previously appeared last week, by mistake.  Sorry.  Put dead bats on my head.  Cover me with honey and roll me on the ant heap. — Kim


When asked why she was leaving the New York theater business for Hollywood, the languorous Tallulah Bankhead is reputed to have said:  “Fame, money and to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”

Well. she achieved all three goals, and was scandalous in a time when scandal was assiduously avoided by the studio bosses.  And her life… oy, what a life.  (Read all about it here.)  And then there was her beauty.

Thise eyes… that heavy-lidded, sleepy look… yikes.  (And yes, she does resemble Bette Davis, and in more ways than one:  they played pretty much the same roles, Tallulah on stage, and Davis in the movie versions.)  And her posture?  Someone once said of her that she didn’t sit in a chair or on a couch;  she looked as if she’d been poured into it.

And let’s not even talk about what she did to a bed (both in pictures and in real life).

I find her fascinating, and I’m not the only one.

Exquisite.  And let’s not even talk about that voice.