Category: Classic Beauty

Where do we start with this 1940s beauty?  Let’s see:  swimmer, dancer, model, jazz singer and actress.  Not bad in the talent department, then.  Oh, and there’s this:

All that, and talent.  Lovely.

“If you’re going to be bad, be bad;  if you’re going to make being bad your career, do it all your life.”

In the case of Tempest Storm, the “bad” was to be a burlesque dancer and stripper;  and she did it from her teens until… well, her last performance was at age 90.  So let’s get on with the show:

Here she is in glorious Technicolor:

And here, at age 85:

And a redhead… wonderful, she was.

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Martha Vickers never had much of a career in movies, and I don’t know why not.  Maybe she was a lousy actress, or didn’t shag the right producers — it was the 1940s, who knows?  Certainly, it could not have been because of her looks:

Just one of those mysteries, I guess.

“Who she?” you may well ask.  Consider this pic first, of someone we all know and love:

…and then know that Scilla Gabel was Sophia Loren’s stand-in and body double for many years on movie sets, when the production crew would be setting up the lighting, position marks and what-have-you before the cameras started to roll with the actual Sophia in the lens.

Later on, Scilla established her own movie career.

So all that having been said, here she is:

And I hate to say it, but Mary Poppins never looked this good:

And finally:

I do believe I can see the resemblance.  Certainly, she’s Sophia’s double in terms of height, coloring and skin tone.

Which makes her stunningly gorgeous and alluring.

I know that Hazel Brooks was born in South Africa, but like me she got Over Here as soon as she could.  Unlike me, she was beautiful and became a movie actress.

Stunning.

Silent / talkies star Colleen Moore, I think, typifies both the look and the ethos of that most interesting era.

And when she moved away from the “flapper” look:  still more beautiful.

One last note about Colleen Moore:  unlike so many actors and actresses of her (or any) era, she actually learned how to keep and grow her income through careful investment.  She even wrote a book about it.  Gorgeous and intelligent, by golly.

It’s just a tragedy that most of her movies, like so many of the early stars, have been lost so we can’t appreciate them fully.