The Beauty of Retrospect - March Actress Edition!

I enter March like a lion as I have a whole bunch of actresses I've featured on this blog before but have not revisited for awhile - a long while in fact.   Some of these women haven't been featured here for years.

I'm primarily concentrating on actresses that have been in the news lately - for their movies, not their personal lives - and so perhaps this isn't so much a look back on these women as it is an update on their careers.  I do look back on one actress who is not as famous as the others, although she hasn't done much of anything since before this blog got started!  So why am I featuring her again?  Because I found a better picture of her than the one I showed before. :-)

And with that, let's get started!  Back tomorrow.   

The Beauty of Renewal: Nastasia Urbano, February 2019

I end this month of February with happy news regarding my friend Nastasia Urbano, the Spanish model who ended up homeless on the streets of Barcelona.  The money raised by the GoFundMe page set up to raise money for her has already begun to pay her dividends, and . . . she is modeling again.

This is why I call call this post a renewal, not a retrospective.

Nastasia's story, originally reported in the Barcelona daily newspaper El Periódico, was picked by Spain'e biggest newspaper, El País, soon thereafter.  Recognizing her place as one of Spain's greatest national treasures (even though she was born and raised in Switzerland, where her Spanish parents emigrated), El País arranged for a special photo session for Nastasia to model numerous outfits for its weekly edition to show Spain and the world that, at 57, she can still turn heads and captivate eyes as well as she did in the eighties and as well as - or better than - the current generation of fashion models.

The six pictures below for El País accompanied an article about Nastasia's current situation and her amazing comeback.  You can access that article by going here.  In the meantime, here are Nastasia's wonderful pictures from that session.  She cut her hair short during her period of destitution, but she will likely grow it back.  It's amazing, though, how beautiful she still looks with this short haircut.

The captions below each picture are taken from El País' special feature.  All photographs are from photographer Manuel Outumuro.

Wool cape with leather flower belt from Delpozo and shoes from Chie Mihara.

Silk jacket from Jnorig and dress from Juan Vida. 

Pant suit from Palomo Spain. 

Jacket from Little Creative Factory and Elsa Peretti bone cuffs for Tiffany &  Co. 

Silk dress with leather belt from Juanjo Oliva. 

Silk dress with kimono sleeves from Roberto Diz and cuffs from VSB Barcelona. 

The last one may very well be my favorite.

There's even a seventh picture, an outtake (below), though the omission of this photo from the original article was more due to lack of space than to lack of quality. :-)

  

Nastasia Urbano (her original first name, by the way, is Consuelo) has already made great strides toward regaining her place in the modeling profession.  She is a testament to what happens when a beloved woman who's fallen on hard times has friends who want to help her succeed and who knows she has the ability to do it.  That's why I love her as both a fan and as a friend. :-)

As of this writing, her GoFundMe page has raised €5,336 (US$6,080.80) out of €6,000 (US$6836.67) sought.  Go to this link to access Nastasia's GoFundMe page if you can donate to help make up the difference. 

For March, I have a whole month of looks back at actresses I've featured here before. Back soon. :-)

The Beauty of Retrospect: The Natural Beauty of Nastasia Urbano

Nastasia Urbano, the Spanish model I am friends with whom I revealed last week was homeless, is doing well.  She's currently staying with a friend in Barcelona, and I have even bigger news about her to share with you . . . tomorrow.  I know you will be very pleased to hear it.

Nastasia is one of the great natural beauties in the modeling profession.  She has always had one of those faces no makeup artist can improve on.  Below is proof.

Taken some time in the early eighties, this picture shows Nastasia in all of her youthful innocence, though she appears to have the same facial expression she displays in her iconic Yves Saint Laurent ad, the picture from which I showed in my earlier post on this blog about her homelessness situation.  (A clarification: I said in my earlier posts that that Yves Saint Laurent ad was for his Opium perfume, and while Nastasia did Opium-specific ads, the ad I refer to was a standard YSL ad, not specifically an ad for Opium.  Those posts have since been reworded.)  She may have played a the role of a goddess in that YSL ad, being all dolled up and glamorous, but this is the real Nastasia Urbano, the Nastasia you would have seen off-camera back in the early 1980s - a sweet, adoraable, accessible woman.

And the Nastasia Urbano you'd see off-camera today is not very different, as seen below in a picture from the mid-2010s. :-) 

When her makeup comes off and her glamour disappears, the beautiful woman and the beautiful person that Nastasia is both shine through stronger than ever.

The Beauty of Retrospect: Maria McDonald

Maria McDonald, whom I last featured in March 2012, is a model who remains active in working for the charity with the group Cover Girls For Change, a consortium of models devoted to social justice.  I loved this picture of her so much that I ran it through the computer to change it from black and white to color, which of course only shows even more how beautiful she is - inside and out. :-)  

This picture is from 1986.

The Beauty of Retrospect: Anne Bezamat, In Living Color

The last time I featured French model Anne Bezamat on this blog, in November 2016, I depicted her pose on the cover of the February 1983 edition of the New York Times' "Fashions of the The Times" Sunday magazine supplement, and I commented that the "quiet understatement" of her pose and said, "The contrast of white and black with her confident expression creates a mystique all her own."

The picture is even more appreciable without the front-cover text.  Here, then, is the original picture, unadorned by headlines and mastheads. :-)

 

This was the second time I ever saw Anne Bezamat on the cover of a magazine, the first time being when I saw her Cosmopolitan cover from the previous summer.  How taken was I by her beauty?  Well, how do you say "head over heels" in French? :-D

Anne Bezamat also did print ads, and she brought the same allure to her commercial work that she brought to her editorial work.  Below is an ad she did in 1982 for Flame Glo cosmetics.

I love how she gazes toward the makeup artist with suspicion, as if she knows she's so naturally beautiful that there's no way he can improve on her looks. :-D 

It's still that same alluring look that has captivated me for decades. :-)    

The Beauty of Retrospect: Kim Alexis with Beverly Johnson for Avon

I'm going to devote March to a look back at actresses I've already featured on this blog, but before I do that, I'd like to look back at models I've featured here before with photos from the vast collection of modeling pictures I've accumulated.  And here's one of the loveliest pictures I've come across - a two-fer showing one of the greatest models of one decade with one of the greatest models of another.

Kim Alexis was just beginning her modeling career when she posed for this Avon catalog photo from around 1981 with Beverly Johnson,  a seventies veteran and already an icon in the modeling profession by the time this photo was taken.  Even though this is for a makeup promotion, the first thing you notice is how naturally perfect their faces are . . . mainly their eyes, their lips, and those incredible cheekbones.

And yes, as one of them is white and the other one is black, this picture is a testament to how feminine beauty comes in all colors and how diverse it is.

I last featured Kim Alexis in June 2014 and I last featured Beverly Johnson in December 2017.

Special Post: Nastasia Urbano Needs Our Help

I'm repeating here a story about a model I've featured here before - a model who happens to be a friend of mine.  It's a story that I covered on my other blog, Miscellaneous Musings.  In late January 2019, the Spanish media reported that Nastasia Urbano, one of the best-known ans most revered models to come from Spain, is  homeless in her hometown of Barcelona.  Her situation is the result of a disastrous marriage and a misplacing of trust in how her money was handled.

Above at left is Nastasia today at 57 years of age, still hauntingly beautiful but showing also the weariness and worry of living out on he street.  At right is Nastasia in her twenties from her iconic Yves Saint Laurent print ad.  I'd be lying if I said you'd never know it was the same woman, because her grace and her inner strength are still quite obvious now as they were then.

Since Nastasia's story got out, her friends have rallied to cause.  One of her longtime friends has set up a GoFundMe page with the goal of raising €6,000 (US$6,814.23) to help her get back on her feet by getting a small apartment so she can resume her modeling career. As of this writing, those of his who know Nastasia, myself, included, and others have contributed  €5,006 (US$5,685.06).  She just needs a few more contributors to reach the €6,000 threshold.  I urge you to contribute whatever you can to her GoFundMe page, to link to which is here.  It's both in Spanish and English.

Thank you.    

Actress Margot White

Never heard of Margot White? Well, you might become acquainted with her as an actress, and very soon.

Ms. White is mostly involved in the theater, particularly regional productions,  Her credits include roles in Shakespeare plays like Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream (as Puck!) as well as in The Three Musketeers.  On Broadway, she's had roles in plays such as Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, and her off-Broadway roles include a part in Love, Love, Love.

Ms. White has also had one-shot parts in various TV shows, so it may (will?) be only a matter of time before she becomes a regular cast member on some television program.

Model Helle Viuff

Helle Viuff is a model who was active in Denmark  in the early 1980s.

She was represented by the Scandinavian Models agency in Copenhagen.

Actress Cicely Tyson

I don't think I can do justice to Cicely Tyson, one of the greatest black actresses of the past century and one of the greatest actresses period of the past century, on this blog.  It would be next to impossible to sum up her acting career - she's done too much! :-D    

But that's a good thing.  Anyway, her best known roles in fact define her long and distinguished career, most notably as Rebecca Morgan in 1972's Sounder.  Rebecca is the matriarch of a sharecropping family in 1933 Louisiana who struggles to help keep her family together in hard times.  Other cinema parts include her portrayal of the café cook Sipsey in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and as Constantine in the notoriously honest movie about Southern racism against black domestic workers in The Help (2011).

She's also well-known for two TV movie roles - the title character of 1974's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, about a former slave who lives a long, long life, and A Woman Called Moses, the 1978 TV movie about Harriet Tubman - Ms. Tyson played the the tile role, of course.

Ms. Tyson also won a Tony Award for playing Carrie Watts in the 2013 Broadway production of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, and she's played several one-shot roles in many a TV series.  As recently as 2015, she stared with James Earl Jones in a production of The Gin Game, a play about two elderly people who meet in a nursing home and begin playing gin rummy together.

At the age of 94 as of this writing, Cicely Tyson is an American institution, having been awarded a Kennedy Center honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Fun fact 1: She was married to jazz musician Miles Davis for eight years beginning in 1981.

Fun fact 2: Her parents were immigrants from Nevis, whose most famous native son is Alexander Hamilton.   

Model Linda Tonge

With her long blonde hair and her perfect face, Linda Tonge was probably the only model of the seventies who rivaled Cheryl Tiegs and Kathy Davis for being representative of what was then considered the "All-American" look.

Her modeling career got off to a roaring start, being selected in 1973 as the model of the year by a panel of fashion editors in a TV special. Working through the Ford agency, Ms. Tonge appeared in numerous print ads and fashion editorials - and also in TV commercials.  The picture below is a still from a commercial she did for a beauty cleanser. 

  

Her career took her through the eighties, and at the end of that decade she retired from modeling to become a real estate agent . . . in her home state of Wisconsin.  Below are two business photos of Ms. Tonge from her current profession.

Linda Tonge returned to Wisconsin in part to care for her aging mother, but she also said she wanted her four sons "to have a good sense of Midwestern values that I grew up knowing."  Switching from modeling agency to a real estate agency brought her full circle; once the top model of her time, Ms. Tonge has since become the top real estate agent in her company.

I have a feeling that she could still go back to modeling if she wanted to, though . . . :-)

Swedish actress Petra Silander

Petra Silander is an actress from Sweden who has mostly concentrated on dystopian sci-fi movies.

She's best known for two films from 2016: 2047: Virtual Revolution, about a future world where people are addicted to video games, controlled by the government and targeted by terrorists, and Dark Web, in which women are hunted as game and the hunts are broadcast on underground Internet channels.

Petra Silander could end up becoming to dystopian movies what Jamie Lee Curtis long was to horror movies - the doyenne of the genre - but hopefully this young actress, 31 years of age at this writing, will branch out like Jamie Lee Curtis did. 

Sportscaster Kristina Pink

I don't pay attention to Fox News.  But Fox's sports reporters?  Those folks are just fantastic, that is really what I think. 

Oh, by the way, which one's Pink? :-D 

Fans of the National Football League are no doubt tickled by Kristina Pink's presence as a field reporter for Fox's coverage of NFL games, mainly for Thursday nights.  She also works as a court-side reporter for the Los Angeles Clippers on  Prime Ticket, a regional sports network owned by Fox. 

Kristina Pink was a sportscaster on local television before joining Fox.  She as a sports reporter for WTVJ-TV, where she covered the National Basketball Association finals, in her hometown of Miami, and she also worked at WGNO-TV in New Orleans. She got her start on both the television and radio stations of the University of Florida, where she earned a communications degree in 2007, and she began her professional career a year later as a sportscaster for WDBD-TV in Jackson, Mississippi.  Her entire media career has been nothing but sports.

See, women can cover athletics as well as play them. :-)

U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

If you think that U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is the future of American politics because of her Hispanic ethnicity and her sex, you're missing the point.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents America's political future not because of what she is but who she is - a die-hard liberal whose public policy positions are the antithesis of not only everything Republicans stand for but also everything many Democrats stand for.  After thirty years of the Democratic Party moving to the center, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez wants to bring it back to its New Deal/Great Society roots.

Among her positions are free college tuition for academically qualified students, single-payer health care, and an aggressive environmental policy to reverse the growth of carbon emissions that cause climate change. She's also espoused a "Green New Deal" - an environmentally friendly economic program that would create new middle-class jobs by developing renewable energy, a position first espoused by former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley - who has praised Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for her push on the proposal - in his 2016 presidential campaign.   

    

At 29, she's the youngest freshman congresswoman ever. And, with her single status, she's also Washington's most eligible bachelorette among young, left-leaning policy geeks, thanks to her exotic looks.  And trust me, her looks aren't the only reason that she's been included on this blog. :-)    

Comedian Kate McKinnon

Kate McKinnon is a woman who proves that beautiful women can be funny . . . even when they're playing men. :-D

Yes, the well-liked "Saturday Night Live" repertory cast member is known for playing Hillary Clinton, Kellyanne Conway, and Elizabeth Warren, among other female politicians, but she's even played Rudolph Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Sessions.

Arguably the funniest woman  or even the funniest cast member of either sex currently on "Saturday Night Live," she's conceived characters such as Helga Handler, a Swedish TV presenter who speaks fake Swedish interspersed with English-language obscenities, and Olya Povlatsky, a Russian woman who opines on current events comparing them to outrageous goings-on in her village.

Kate McKinnon has also been in the movies, playing Dr. Jillian Holtzmann in the all-female 2016 remake of Ghostbusters and appearing in the 2017 bachelorette-party comedy Rough Night.  At 35 years of age, Kate McKinnon still has a long career ahead of her. :-)