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:
Category: Beauty
Renaissance Man
What do you call a man who was a professor of Architecture at Turin University, photographer, writer, skier, inventor of engines and designer of race cars, acrobatic pilot and mountaineer? Carlo Mollino.
I have to say that I’m not enamored of his exterior architecture designs — there’s way too much Gropius and not enough Athens, never mind art nouveau;
…although not all the time:
His interiors are a little too Scandi and not enough Edwardian:
…although his Teatro Regio in Turin is incredible:
…from the inside; the outside?
…and of his furniture we will not speak.
(Follow the link above for a full exposition of all these, and more.)
But how can you not enjoy his design of something as mundane as a bus?
And then there was his Basiluro race car, which at Le Mans 1955 (yes, that Le Mans race) managed to reach 135mph with a 750cc engine (!) until it was forced off the track into a ditch by a Jaguar:
However, it was Mollino’s photography which first caught my attention (guess why):
And my favorite:
His ultimate expression was this statement:
“Humans matter only insomuch as they contribute to a historic process; outside of history, humans are nothing.”
And Carlo Mollino sure left his mark on the historical process, in so many fields. Che uomo!
Classic Beauty: Marie Doro
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.
Random Totty
Never heard of actress Laura Benanti before (probably because she’s mostly a stage actress), but yowzer:
Not bad for 45, eh?
Asking The Question
Here’s another one that needs answering:
Okay, regardless of who these people are (most Murkins have no idea, which is not important), here are the the dramatis personae.
Holly Willoughby (no stranger to these pages, of course)
Alison Hammond (another Brit TV personality, and owner of the Most Irritating Voice On TV)
Ignoring what was said — trust me, it probably wasn’t that bad, it’s Brit TV — my question is: how would one tell if the latter was blushing?
Classic Beauty: Maude Fealey
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.