Model Lena Kansbod

Lena Kansbod is a Swedish model who was discovered in Stockholm at the age of seventeen. Four years later, in 1977, she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue, and her career really took off from there.

She appeared on the covers of other magazines, such as Elle and Mademoiselle, and in the early eighties she was also a featured face in Revlon's Natural Wonder cosmetics line. She eventually married a man from France and moved there.

Though from Sweden, she suspected that her success as a model in America was due to her having an "all-American" look. 

Here's the cover of that aforementioned Sports Illustrated issue, with the all-American-looking Lena Kansbod photographed in America's most exotic state, Hawaii. :-)

Actress Brittany Ishibashi

It takes a special talent and an indelible presence for a young actress to attract attention while having as female co-stars veterans Sigourney Weaver and Ellen Burstyn. And in the recently aired USA miniseries "Political Animals," Brittany Ishibashi did just that.

Brittany Ishibashi has mostly played one-shot roles on other television series, along with a regular role on the short-lived supernatural drama "Ghostfacers."  But she virtually stole the show in "Political Animals," a drama about an ambitious American ex-First Lady turned Secretary of State and her family.  Ms. Ishibashi played Anne Ogami, the Japanese-American fiancée of Secretary of State Elaine Barrish's son Douglas Hammond.  To give you an idea of just how much these United States have changed, the interracial angle of the engagement subplot was rarely played up.

As groundbreaking as that was for basic cable television, it may also have a groundbreaking effect on Ms. Ishibashi's own career.

Fun fact: Her last name, a common surname in Japan, is Japanese for "stone bridge."  

CNBC newswoman Sue Herera

Sue Herera is a rarity among American television news anchors these days; she's been with the same news channel since its founding.

Sue Herera was one of the founders of the Consumer News and Business Channel (CNBC), and she has been a major player in it ever since.  She's co-hosted the CNBC show "Power Lunch" since 2003, which signifies the kind of longevity that's increasingly rare in broadcast journalism these days.

Before joining CNBC, she was a reporter on the Financial News Network, where she demonstrated her expertise in topics such as foreign exchange and futures trading.  She published her book "Women of the Street: Making It On Wall Street -- The World's Toughest Business" in 1997.  

Stage actress Jessica Lee Goldyn

Jessica Lee Goldyn broke through in the theater at the tender age of twenty, when she was cast as Val in the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line.

As of this writing, she was set to appear in a New Jersey production of the revered 1975 musical, as Cassie this time, in a limited run during October 2012, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn.

Ms. Goldyn's other stage credits include the role Ivy in a Manhattan production of On the Town, as well as a a Maine State Music Theatre  production of Crazy For You.  She also choreographed a 2009 production of Sweet Charity at the Mac-Haydn Theater in Chatham, New York, and played Tiger Lily in a 2010 production of Peter Pan, also at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse.       

Model Viviane Fauny

Viviane Fauny is a French model who was active from the late sixties to well into the eighties.

She worked through three Paris modeling agencies between 1967 and 1970 - Dorian Leigh, Paris Planning Women, and Models International - before going to Elite's Paris office.

In the early eighties, she worked in America and was represented by Elite in Los Angeles and by Ellen Harth in New York.

Carmen Dell'Orefice

The one and only. :-)

Carmen Dell'Orefice is a legend in the modeling trade, having become a supermodel long before the term was even coined.  Born in New York, she began her career as a teenager, appearing in 1947 on the cover of Vogue at the age of sixteen, making her one of the youngest females to be featured on a Vogue cover.  Her career really took off in the fifties, and she went on to work with all the esteemed photographers from Irving Penn to Francesco Scavullo to Richard Avedon . . . and everyone in between.

Carmen - as with Cher or Sting, a single name can suffice - retired from modeling in the late fifties, but returned to the profession in 1978 at the age of 47.  Nowadays, it's common for fashion and beauty models to continue working past the age of forty or for other models to come out of retirement past that age.  But Carmen pretty much did both first.

In September 2012, she walked the runway during Fashion Week in New York at the age of 81.  She modeled clothes from the Norisol Ferrari Spring 2013 collection.  Her age didn't matter - she still has the look. :-)

Looking back at her career recently, Carmen reflected on the perks of modeling, noting that she had bought  herself a husband. (Her quick wit suggests that if modeling hadn't worked out, she could have been a comedian, though she probably wasn't joking.)  She was in fact engaged to talk show host David Susskind, but he died before they could be married.

CNBC journalist Jackie DeAngelis

Jackie DeAngelis is another rising star on the Consumer News and Business Channel.

As a leading on-air personality on CNBC, she's hosted the channel's "Capital Connection" and its global business news program "Worldwide Exchange." She's also worked behind the scenes, producing special CNBC programming involving profiles of and interviews with the movers and shakers of the financial and political world. 

Jackie DeAngelis also covered business activity in the Middle East and ended up covering activity there of a different sort . . . the Arab Spring.

Actress/model Lois Chiles

Texas native Lois Chiles began the seventies as a model and ended the decade as an actress. She became a Bond girl in a James Bond movie that, without the influence of George Lucas, likely would never have been made.

The Bond movie in question was Moonraker, a 1979 Bond movie using space colonization as its theme, which was conceived as an answer to Star Wars.  Lois Chiles played  Dr. Holly Goodhead, an American astronaut and NASA scientist who proved to be Bond's intellectual match - the influence of feminism. :-)   She had a knack at the time for playing headstrong women.  In the 1978 Agatha Christie movie Death On the Nile, her character was so headstrong she gave practically everyone on an Egyptian river cruise a motive to kill her - and so became the story's murder victim.

Family matters that required Lois Chiles to take time off from acting, not the so-called "Bond girl" curse, diminished her star power in the early eighties, but she gave favorable performances in late-eighties movies such as Sweet Liberty (1986) and Broadcast News (1987).  She also made guest appearances on numerous TV shows.

Fun fact:  Her uncle Eddie Chiles was an oil tycoon who also owned the Texas Rangers baseball team from 1980 to 1989.

Actress Geneviève Bujold

In the seventies and early eighties, Geneviève Bujold was the most recognizable French-Canadian celebrity apart from Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

In the sixties, her French background allowed her to work in France with directors like Alain Resnais (in The War is Over) and Louis Malle (in The Thief of Paris).  She became an international star after playing Anne Boleyn, the doomed wife of King Henry VIII of England and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, in the 1969 movie Anne of a Thousand Days, co-starring Richard Burton as Henry VIII.  Subsequent movie credits included Alex and the Gypsy (opposite Jack Lemmon) and Coma, based on the Robin Cook thriller novel, with Michael Douglas, as well as Obsession, co-starring Cliff Robertson. 

In the eighties, Geneviève Bujold  formed a fruitful professional relationship with director Alan Rudolph, appearing in his movies Choose Me (1984) , Trouble In Mind (1985) and The Moderns (1988), while also finding time to appear in the 1984 detective thriller Tightrope with Clint Eastwood and in a few movies in Canada. 

Geneviève Bujold continues to work, having turned seventy in July 2012, mostly in small indie films.   

Actress Odette Annable

Odette Annable has appeared in numerous television shows in recent years, most notably as Dr. Jessica Adams on "House."

She also played Melanie in the sitcom "Breaking In," which, like "House," aired on Fox.

Though pegged as an "Hispanic" actress, because her father is Colombian and her mother is Cuban, Odette Annable's father is actually of Italian and French descent, so, like the majority of Americans, the California-born actress is actually a good mix of things. :-)

She married actor Dave Annable in 2010.

The Beauty of Retrospect, Special Post: Nancy Donahue, 1979

I have avoided showing pictures of legendary model Nancy Donahue since December 2010 because, after we connected via social media as a result of she and some of her peers discovering this blog, I met her in person in 2010, just a week before Christmas, and we've become good friends. This means that, according to my own rules, I can't feature her on this blog anymore . . . because I don't feature women I know personally and have met in person. But in the course of surfing the interactive network known as the World Wide Web, I came across one picture of Nancy Donahue that I just couldn't resist including here.

This picture of our heroine gloriously tossing back her sensational blond hair comes from the early days of her modeling career - specifically, the November 1979 U.S. issue of Vogue, in a fashion editorial photographed by Patrick Demarchelier.  In late 1979, life sucked.  But Nancy Donahue and her peers made the time (and the decade to follow, which also sucked) much more bearable.  

Part of the pleasure of being my own boss and setting my own rules is that I can give myself permission to make exceptions to the rules every now and then. :-)

Back in a few days with the start of my next A-Z round . . . 

The Latest Numbers . . . And Other Things

I have now posted pictures of 611 different women on my blog.  And far from having exhausted the number of potential candidates, I am gearing up to present even more.

As for my just-completed feature of athletes - "The Beauty of Sport, Part Two" - I must admit that I was surprised to find, once I began looking for female athletes that I hadn't featured yet, too many to feature in a  single month.  Oh, I knew there were plenty out there, even if you see most of them only once every four years at the Olympics. But because you don't see to many of them very often, my problem, so I thought when I started, was knowing where to look. So, having accumulated pictures of more athletes than I could use, I'm saving the surplus pictures of female athletes that I still have on file to form the basis of a third "Beauty of Sport" series later on  . . . and I can assure you that it won't take another five years and change to present it. :-D

As for the statistics on my second "Beauty of Sport" series, the results were quite illuminating.  I had a feeling  that Britain's Jessica Ennis would be a huge favorite, and sure enough, as of today, my first post of her has gotten 846 pageviews - easily making her my most popular subject of the month gone by . . . and by a wide margin.  French swimmer Coralie Balmy surprisingly came in second overall among the subjects of my second edition of  "The Beauty of Sport" - it was a surprise because she's not well-known outside France, and my blog doesn't get a lot of traffic from there - with 185 pageviews.  She's a distant second, to be sure, but second just the same.  For the even more distant third place, swimmer Natalie Coughlin edges out track racer Carmelita Jeter with 44 pageviews as opposed to 43.  So there's gold, silver and bronze for you. :-D

Again - I cannot emphasize this enough - I included retrospective posts of Sanya Richards-Ross and Allyson Felix after wrapping up my series, because even though I'd featured them before, I featured them as part of a relay team and not as individuals, which did not do them any justice.  Also, they were two of the biggest American stars at the London Olympics.   I couldn't ignore them.          

All right, then, I'm starting my next A to Z round . . . right after I get a special post out of the way.  Just one more thing . . ..  In my post honoring Sigourney Weaver this past July, I noted that she played a "doomed conservationist" in the docudrama movie Gorillas In the Mist without mentioning the conservationist's name.  Ms. Weaver, of course, played Dian Fossey in that film.  Also, in my post paying tribute to Allyson Felix, I made her an athlete of ancient times by saying she won a championship in "207," when of course I meant 2007.  Both original posts have since been corrected.

So . . . one more retrospective, then it's another A to Z round of previously unfeatured but very beautiful women . . ..

The Beauty of Retrospect: Track star Sanya Richards-Ross

I originally featured Sanya Richards-Ross in August 2008 as part of the American champion women's 4x400-meter track team at the Beijing Olympics, along with Allyson Felix. And like Allyson Felix, she deserves a post of her own. So here I go. :-)

Sanya Richards-Ross is a textbook case of an immigrant's success story in America. Born in Jamaica, she immigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of twelve. Although she originally settled in Florida, she now makes her home in Austin, Texas, having graduated from the University of Texas there in 2006 with a degree in a management information systems.

She was a part of three - three - U.S. Olympic championship women's 4x400-meter relay track teams, in Athens and London as well as Beijing. She was also on that many winning U.S. women's 4x400-meter relay track teams at the World Championships in Paris (2003), Osaka (2000), and Berlin (2009).  She's also won the Olympic gold medal in the solo 400-meter race in London as well as winning a World Championships gold medal in that same event in Berlin.

So, yes, the 400-meter race is her specialty. :-)      

She married NFL player Aaron Ross in 2010. 

The Beauty of Retrospect: American track star Allyson Felix

Allyson Felix was a Cinderella track sprinter at the Olympics, always coming up short in the women's 200-meter race.  Then, in London, she won the big prize that had always eluded her - an Olympic gold medal in that very event. :-) 

And here she is with it. :-)

Allyson Felix won the Olympic silver medal in the 200-meter race at Athens in 2004 and at Beijing in 2008, but even though the third time in London probed to be the golden charm, it's not her only Olympic gold medal. At London, she also was part of the champion women's 4x100-meter team.  She also has two gold medals for the 4x400-meter relay race, one from London and the other from Beijing four years earlier.  I first featured Ms. Felix in August 2008 as part of the victorious American four-woman team in Beijing.  Here I focus enrtirely on her.

Ironically, despite the fact that it took some time to win the 200-meter dash at the Olympics, Allyson Felix did it three times in the World Championships, at Helsinki in 2005, at 2007 in Osaka, and at 2009 in Berlin.

Allyson Felix also holds an elementary education degree from the University of Southern California.