Japanese actress Yukie Nakama

Yukie Nakama is considered to be one of the most bankable actresses on Japanese television. :-)

She achieved fame in Japan in the TVs show "Trick" as a young magician who helps a professor debunk spiritualists and solve supernatural cases. The series ran for three seasons and spawned as many movies, but it was her role as Kumiko Yamaguchi, a teacher in an all-male school in the TV series "Gokusen," a live-action version of a Japanese art comic, that made her a star in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Model Pat McGuire

Patricia "Pat" McGuire is a model who worked extensively in the 1970s and 1980s.

Originally represented by the famed Wilhelmina modeling agency, she was modeling through Elite Elegance by the late eighties.

British sixties model Jill Kennington

Jill Kennington has led what you might call a full, rich life. :-)

Ms. Kennington was discovered by a modeling agent in London in while working at the famed Harrods department store. She modeled during the height of the Swinging London period of the mid-1960s, and she later lived and worked in Paris and Rome. She worked with legendary photographers such as David Bailey, and her assignments took her all over the world.

Today, Jill Kennington is a photographer, a vocation she began in 1982, and she lives in the English countryside in West Dorset. You can learn the details of her incredible biography in an interview with her by going to this link.

Fun fact: Jill Kennington had a small part in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic movie Blow Up.

TV reporter Weijia Jiang

Like most TV reporters, Weijia Jiang has moved from one local TV station to another. She did so before getting the plum job all TV news reporters secretly yearn for: a job in New York.

She was the Washington correspondent for WBRE-TV in Scranton, Pennsylvania and a reporter, substitute anchor, and substitute producer at WBOC-TV in Salisbury, Maryland before going to WJZ-TV, CBS's affiliate in Baltimore.  She left to join the local news deaprtment of CBS's New York station, WCBS-TV, where she has been since June 2012.

But here are a few facts about Weijia Jiang that may interest you. Not only did she and her family emigrate from China when she was a little girl, they originally settled in West Virginia. She's also a graduate of the College of William and Mary, where she studied philosophy and chemistry. So she certainly brings a unique perspective as a reporter for WCBS-TV.

TV newswoman Holly Headrick

Holly Headrick is a TV news anchorwoman from North Carolina who was born and raised in that state and has never worked anywhere else.

She anchors the morning news broadcast at WLOS-TV in Asheville, an ABC affiliate. She's a graduate of the the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holding a journalism/mass communication degree, and she worked earlier as a reporter for WWAY-TV in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she earned the Associated Press Rookie of the Year award.

Before going on the air at WLOS-TV, Ms. Headrick was a producer and an assignment editor at that station. Also, while at WLOS-TV, she has worked with local law enforcement agencies on her Fugitive Files segment, which has brought many at-large criminal suspects to justice.

Political commentator Karen Finney

Karen Finney is a political consultant who has found a second career as a pundit, both in print and on the air.

A former press secretary to Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Virginia-born-and-bred Ms. Finney also served as spokesperson and communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Today she is a columnist for The Hill, a daily newspaper covering Congress, as well as a commentator for Politico and the Huffington Post. She's also a frequent commentator on the MSNBC cable news channel.

Her exotic looks come from her biracial background; she has a black father an a white mother. And - I am not making this up - she is a descendant of Robert E. Lee on her mother's side.

Model Kelly Emberg

Kelly Emberg is yet another eighties model whose beauty and elegance made that decade bearable.

She appeared in ads for Cover Girl cosmetics and Napier jewelry (which you know about), but she's probably best known for being the girlfriend of British rock star Rod Stewart for much of the eighties.  They had a daughter, Ruby, born in 1987, and they broke up in 1990.

In the nineties, the Houston-born Ms. Emberg studied interior design at the University of California at Los  Angeles and worked in the field, taking on clients as such as Pam Dawber, Mark Harmon  and, ironically, Rod Stewart.  (It's nice to know that they still respected each other.)

She now has her own fruit and vegetable garden, and she's active in getting others to grow their own food in a sustainable, environmentally friendly manner through her Web site.

Actress/model Yaya DaCosta

Yaya DaCosta is a actress who got discovered through a reality competition show. She was an also-ran on "America's Next Top Model," which led to her budding - and successful - acting career.

And she's definitely got the look. :-)

She appeared in the 2006 dance movie Take the Lead and also had supporting roles in the art film The Kids Are All Right and the sci-fi movie Tron: Legacy. In addition to several one-shot parts on TV shows, she's also appeared on Broadway, as part of the cast of The First Breeze of Summer in the 2008-09 season.

A graduate of Brown University, she's fluent in Portuguese, French and Spanish, as well as English.

Actress and comedian Whitney Cummings

Whitney Cummings is the latest in a series of comedians who play fictionalized versions of themselves on television. The difference is, she just happens to be a woman.

On her NBC show "Whitney," Ms. Cummings lives with her boyfriend and, based on her own observations of other couples, tries various unconventional means to keep their relationship exciting.

She's also one of the show's executive producers.

British TV personality Christine Bleakley

Christine Bleakley is, you might say, the Meredith Vieira of British television.

She co-hosted the topical magazine show "The One Show" on the BBC with Adrian Chiles from 2007 to 2010, and both of them hosted the morning show "Daybreak" on the commercial ITV network from 2010 to 2011.  Today, still at ITV, she hosts "Dancing On Ice," a British contest show like "Dancing With the Stars," only it involves figure skating.     

Model Debara Bertin

Debara Bertin is a model from the seventies and eighties who, when she was working in Paris, was represented by the Covers agency.

   

In the early eighties, she was prominently featured in an ad for Revlon's European Collagen Complex cream, from which this picture is taken. The ad promised younger-looking skin within ten days after beginning use of the product. The focus here on her full face, with her hair pulled back, certainly made for an effective selling point. :-)

Newswoman Lauren Ashburn

Lauren Ashburn is a reporter from the old media - television and newspapers - who's currently invested in the new media. 

Having been a contributor to CBS's "The Early Show" and an anchor and reporter for WJLA-TV, Washington, D.C.'s ABC affiliate, she was also a reporter for USA Today.  Today she is the editor of the Daily Download, a Web site she founded that features news stories and commentary and reports on social media.  

She regularly appears on the PBS Newshour with Howard Kurtz, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," to talk about the various trends in social media and Internet news reporting.  

March 2013: Commentary

Before I begin my new A-Z round of beautiful women, I'd like to make additional comments about the popularity of Kristen Welker on this blog, as well as some comments on a semi-related story that has only now grabbed my attention.

I was going over my earlier statistics, and I noticed how much time I let lapse at one point in checking my statistics. In May 2012, the last time I reported statistics here before October 2012, my original post of Ms. Welker wasn't even in the top ten; by October, it was in second place, quickly taking the lead thereafter. So, even though it appeared that she came out of nowhere to become the most popular subject on this blog, my post of her more likely made its way up the stats chart more gradually, and that its rise in popularity was not so meteoric.

Be that as it may, I'm now keeping close tabs on my daily, weekly, and monthly statistics to see if posts depicting anyone else might break into the top ten and possibly be contenders for the number one spot. (Numbers for posts in the lower five positions on the all-time top ten list appear to have stagnated, while posts not yet on that list are showing strong activity.) But I have to say once again that I'm very pleased that a post of a biracial woman, at a time of increased racial animosity in America, has gotten so much attention. Not just in pageviews, but in comments; my original post of Ms. Welker has received ten comments, all favorable (adjectives used to describe her have included "hot," "smart," "beautiful," "knowledgeable," "articulate," "focused," "elegant," and "professional"). Her transcendental quality as a woman of black and white origin proves that racism is slowly dying.

But it's dying too slowly. Once, the modeling trade was dominated by the likes of black superstars such as Naomi Sims, Pat Cleveland, Alva Chinn, Iman, the two Johnsons - Beverly and Sheila - and Louise Vyent, all of whom have appeared on this blog. (Not to mention that hot VW from Detroit, Veronica Webb. :-D) Inexplicably, however, black models have slowly been disappearing from the scene since the mid-1990s, and to the point where they're few and far between these days. So I was shocked when an international fashion magazine recently printed pictures of a white American female model posing as an "African Queen." The pictures (which I won't show here) in Numéro magazine show model Ondria Hardin, 16, wearing bronze makeup and darkened hair to make her look "black."

As a white man who has always been attracted to black women (I had severe crushes on some of the women mentioned in the previous paragraph), I was appalled by this blatant racism and outright mockery of the black race, particularly at a time when few of today's black models seem to be able to cultivate a high profile, and I wasn't happy with Numéro's non-committal apology that expressed regret "if" anyone was offended while defending the artistic expression of the folks involved. Disgusting. Anyway, I certainly have no intention of ever featuring Ondria Hardin on this blog once she turns eighteen. And when I found out that Constance Jablonski, a French model of Polish descent who was to appear in my next A-Z round, did a similar fashion editorial in brown makeup and an Afro wig, I decided not to feature her, either. They're both banned for life here. I'm not going to endorse any model who engages in such minstrelsy. These young women are old enough to know better and refuse such assignments. Beverly Johnson, remember, famously decided to stop accepting assignments for cigarette and liquor ad assignments because she no longer wanted to be associated with ad campaigns that promote smoking and drinking. She gave up a lot of lucrative assignments, and her agents were unhappy about it. She may have lost work, but she kept her principles. Too bad today's Caucasian models can't do the same.

All right, time to get off my soapbox. The next post will feature a woman I haven't featured before. I promise. :-)

The Beauty of Retrospect: Kristen Welker, My All-Time Champion!

And she is, Kristen Welker, the most popular woman on my blog! :-D

I'd wanted to limit my retrospective posts to two before going on to my next A-Z round of original subjects as part of my effort to cut back on revisiting the same women time after time after time, but the immense popularity of my earlier - and, until today, only - post showing NBC's exotically lovely White House correspondent (who provides updates on MSNBC on a more or less regular basis) demands that I present a sequel. Hence, this third retrospective before the next series of new faces. Feel free to click on this image to enlarge it, the better to appreciate Ms. Welker's beauty! :-)

The photo above shows our heroine doing what she does best - reporting on the news coming out of the White House, with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself in the background.

Okay, let's see how many pageviews this post gets!  At the very least, the numbers it generates by the time I report on my statistics again - probably late April - should shake things up a bit.

I'll be back soon with another round of beautiful women appearing here for the first time. :-)

The Latest Numbers and Statistics

I have now posted pictures of 671 different women on this blog, though there are obviously more pictures - spread out across 960 separate posts - than there are single subjects. (Don't ask me to count the number of pictures used! :-D)

I now have the latest statistics for the ten most popular posts of all time - all time, as always, defined as since May 2008, when Blogger.com started keeping such records. Feel free to click on the image below to enlarge it.

Compared to December 2012, when I last posted statistics, not much as happened at the top. As always, my July 2011 post showing NBC reporter Kristen Welker remains the most popular one by a wide, wide, wide margin, with my September 2009 post paying tribute to model Sheila Johnson (the first of several such posts) a distant second - 17,228 to 8,570, resulting in a much wider gap between the two than before. My February 2011 post of model-actress Joan Severance and my January 2012 post of actress Kaley Cuoco remain at number three and four, respectively.

There are couple of changes farther down. My July 2011 post of actress Piper Perabo and my January 2012 post of actress Erin Gray were separated from sixth and seventh place, respectively, by only two pageviews. Now they're separated by 464 views, with my October 2010 post of The Weather Channel personality Crystal Egger in between, at 3,410 pageviews. My post devoted to Ms. Perabo has thus knocked my post showing Ms. Egger out of fifth place to claim that position.

Farther down, my April 2009 post of model-turned-newswoman Willow Bay has been knocked out of the top ten, while my April 2011 post of German model Margrit Ramme has dropped from eighth to ninth - though she's still the most popular non-American woman on this blog - and my February 2011 post of actress Meg Ryan has dropped from ninth to tenth. (Last time, my post of Ms. Ryan was at 1,400 pageviews, but that number has since been adjusted downward by two.) These changes are the result of the surge of interest in my May 2011 post of NBC television reporter Atia Abawi, which has since entered the top ten and is now at number eight with 1,704 pageviews. She has a long way to go here before she can catch up with her colleague Kristen Welker, though, whose entry has gotten about ten views for every view Atia Abawi's entry has gotten.

So it's settled: Kristen Welker is a big hit here. So I've decided to post another picture of her . . . and then we'll see if my second post paying tribute to her is as popular as the first.

The Beauty of Retrospect: Karen Graham, 1975

I always seem to find more photos of Karen Graham, whose portfolio is nothing short of immense. Here's another photo I found of her, from 1975 - presumably from a fashion magazine editorial feature.

Her dress is a Pucci design, but do you think I really care about that? :-D

The Beauty of Retrospect: Isabelle Adjani

I'd like to feature a couple of retrospectives before I go to the next A-Z round of new subjects (and the latest stats), so tonight I present another look at Isabelle Adjani, France's greatest living actress whose name isn't Catherine Deneuve.

Isabelle Adjani has been very active since I first featured her in March 2008. In fact, in 2009, she appeared in her first theatrically released movie in six years - Skirt Day, in which she played a high school teacher who has to deal with bored students in a violent environment. It earned her her fifth César Award for Best Actress. (The Césars are the French equivalent of the Oscars.) In Skirt Day, her character takes her class hostage in an act of desperation to reach them. To Sir, With Love it is not.

Ms. Adjani's more recent movies include Mammuth (2010) and De Force (2011).  She plays the mother of a young, headstrong Indian woman in the Hindi film Ishkq in Paris, the release of which has been delayed repeatedly but, as of this writing, should be released some time in 2013.

Fun fact #1: Isabelle Adjani isn't ethnically French. She's half-Kabyle, as her father was an Algerian immigrant in France, and half-German.

Fun fact #2: She was romantically linked to Daniel Day-Lewis from 1989 to 1995.

Model/artist Jennifer Yarrow

Jennifer Yarrow may look like another pretty face from the modeling trade, but there's more to her than meets the eye.

She's currently an abstract painter, based in Kelowna, British Columbia, and as of this writing she's planning an exhibit of her work. She has also been a teacher in the Waldorf system of education, developed by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The Waldorf method involves teaching children in elementary and middle school by encouraging the development of their artistic expression and social capacities, which is meant to foster creative and analytical modes of understanding.  Ms. Yarrow taught at a Waldorf school in Minnesota.

She is also, as of this writing, working on her memoirs. 

Television actress Dreama Walker

I have a Dreama today. :-D

Dreama Walker is a young actress who has mostly made her mark on television. Her most recent role was as June Colburn, an underemployed Midwestern girl in New York forced to share an apartment with a con artist-party girl named Chloe, in the ABC sitcom "Don't Trust the B---- In Apartment 23." Chloe, the b---- in question, was played by Krysten Ritter, featured earlier on this blog.

Alas, ABC canceled the show in early 2013, despite positive reviews.

Dreama Walker has appeared on in several other TV shows, including a recurring role on "The Gossip Girl," as well as several movies, including Gran Torino. So, despite her recent setback, there's reason to believe that this Dreama isn't going to fade.

Actress/model Beth Tegarden

Beth Tegarden is a model who has made the transition to acting.

As an actress, she's appeared in obscure movies and a few one-shot TV roles.

Her most notable role is in the 1997 movie Tender Loving Care, in which she played a distraught mother of a car crash victim.

Actress Heather Alicia Simms

Heather Alicia Simms is a familiar (and beautiful) face to avid TV viewers.

She has played different parts in the "Law & Order" franchise, and she has appeared on the daytime drama "As The World Turns" and the nighttime drama "Third Watch." 

She also appeared in the movie Broken Flowers, and she's also worked in the theater.  

Model Chris Royer

Christine Royer - commonly known as Chris - is one of the most elegant and most stunningly lovely fashion and beauty models of the 1970s.

In her heyday, she did many editorials for Vogue, as well as ads for Valentino. She was also associated closely with the designer Halston, and she was regarded as his inspiration.

She remained involved in fashion and beauty in her post-modeling career, going on to serve as vice president of Revlon's Ultima II division. Since 1997, she has been president of CRC, a consulting firm that specializes in strategic licensing and marketing. Many of CRC's clients have included M.A.C. Cosmetics, Conair, and Lulu Guinness.

She has remained synonymous with Halston, serving as an archivist for the designer's work and as a consultant for books and documentaries about him.

The 666th Woman

When I did my count at the start of the current A-Z round of women on this blog, I realized I'd be coming up  to my 666th subject.  This presented something of a problem, because no one wants to be associated with the "number of the beast."  Then I started thinking . . . what woman is there who is exclusively associated with the darkness?  Indeed, what woman who is so associated would have enough of a sense of humor to appreciate being the 666th woman on my blog?

They were easy questions to answer.

 

Ha ha! But of course - who else could it be but . . . Elvira, Mistress of the Dark?  She's best known as the host of "Movie Macabre," a weekly horror movie presentation on KHJ-TV in Los Angeles in the eighties  which returned as a nationally syndicated feature in 2010.  Basically a modern reworking of the 1950s LA horror movie hostess Vampira, Elvira is distinguished by a tight-fitting outfit showing ample cleavage,  coupled with a sarcastic sense of humor and a biting wit delivered with a San Fernando Valley Girl attitude.  She became a national sensation and even got herself a movie - simply called Elvira, Mistress Of the Dark - in 1988.

In real life Elvira is Cassandra Peterson, a Kansas-born actress who had small roles in various movies in the seventies (including the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever).  She even auditioned for the role of Ginger Grant in the third "Gilligan's Island" reunion TV movie (Tina Louise has been trying to dissociate herself from that role since 1967) before getting the role of a lifetime.

Please note that this post was published at 7:06 PM - sixty-six minutes past six o'clock.

Elvira would love that. :-D    

TV newswoman Maryam Nemazee

Maryam Nemazee is an Iranian-British TV news reporter who's quickly gained an international reputation.

  

She worked for the BBC's Channel 4 and for the privately owned British Channel 5 before joining al-Jazeera English, where she hosted their primary news programs and a debate show. In 2010, she joined Bloomberg television, where she hosts the London-based weekday show "The Pulse with Maryam Nemazee," which reports international business and finance news. At Bloomberg, her credits include interviews with several prominent statesmen and bankers . . . and British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

CNBC reporter Melissa Lee

You can't watch CNBC too long without seeing Melissa Lee at least once.

The onetime reporter for Bloomberg Television and CNN Financial News hosts no fewer than four CNBC shows: "Squawk on the Street," "Fast Money," "Options Action," and "Money in Motion: Currency Trading." She's also hosted documentaries on the Coca-Cola Company and on the threat of cyber-terrorism.

Ms. Lee got her start in journalism as a reporter for a local newspaper in her hometown of Great Neck, New York, out on Long Island.

Model Samantha Jones

Samantha Jones is a model from the swinging sixties who also dabbled a little in acting. :-)

She had a small role in the movie Wait Until Dark and made a guest appearance on the TV series "McMillan and Wife."  The bulk of her legacy, though, is a massive and impressive portfolio of modeling work with some of the most distinguished fashion photographers in the business.

As gorgeous as she looks in the glamour photos above, she looks just as beautiful in the photo below, in which she poses without makeup. 

You know that line from Steel Magnolias . . . "There is no such thing as natural beauty . . ."?  Don't you believe it. :-)   

Actress Cheryl Hines

Cheryl Hines has been in several movies and TV shows, but she is probably most associated with two television programs in particular - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Suburgatory."

She was so convincing as the wife of Larry David - who played an exaggerated version of himself - in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" that when the show first debuted on HBO in 2000, her friends back in her hometown of Tallahassee, Florida thought she was really David's wife.  (Her character's first name was also Cheryl.)

She currently plays Dallas Royce in "Suburgatory," an ABC series poking fun of lily-white upper-middle-class suburbia.  Her character is a stereotypical self-absorbed suburbanite with superficial goals.

In 2009, Cheryl Hines directed Serious Moonlight, a black comedy about a woman (Meg Ryan, previously featured on this blog) who wants to stop her husband (Timothy Hutton) form leaving her.  

Model Maria Hanson

Maria Hanson is a model who was very active in the late seventies and the eighties.

At the peak of her career, she modeled for several editorial features and advertisements.

But none of the work she did for editors or fashion designers made her as ubiquitous as her stint as a "Maidenform woman" in the eighties.  In those ads, which were for Maidenform lingerie, Ms. Hanson was always photographed in public settings - next to a hot dog stand, an opera house, a race track - wearing  Maidenform underwear and not much else.  Maria Hanson wasn't the only Maidenform model in the eighties, just the most  widely recognized one.  (Sheila Johnson was another Maidenform model at the time.)

The ads all featured the same slogan: "The Maidenform Woman.  You never know where she'll turn up."

And so Maria Hanson turns up here - fully clothed, thank you very much. :-D

I'm sorry, those Maidenform ads were so silly, and that's not all Maria Hanson has been as a model.  That's why I focused here on her non-Maidenform work.

Pittsburgh TV newswoman Kimberly Gill

Kimberly Gill is a familiar face in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. She's an anchor of the weekday editions of the 12:00 PM and 4:00 PM news reports on KDKA-TV, the CBS affiliate in the Steel City.

In addition to being a familiar face, she's also a pretty one.  That's why I'm featuring Kimberly Gill here.

 :-D

She's originally from South Carolina, where she anchored the weekday morning and noon reports at WBTW-TV in Florence.  She also anchored a weekday morning news show for WEWS-TV in Cleveland.

If broadcast journalism doesn't work out for her ultimately, Ms. Gill has a fallback.  She worked her way through college at the University of South Carolina, where she graduated with a broadcast journalism degree, as a parcel truck driver. Not parcel delivery vans like in "The King of Queens" - eighteen-wheelers, the big rigs. Ms. Gill still keeps her Class A commercial driver’s license current. 

Chinese actress Fan Bingbing

Of course, because Fan Bingbing is from China, her last name comes first, so I'm keeping with the alphabetical order. :-) 

Ms. Fan became a star in China in her teens, when she appeared in the Chinese historical television drama "Princess Pearl," about the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty that ruled China from 1644 to 1912.

Among the movies she's made in her homeland are Cell Phone, A Battle of Wits, and Matrimony, as well as Buddha Mountain.  She continues to do a lot of Chinese television, and she's also popular in nearby Japan. 

A lot of people in the Far East, evidently, are "Fan fans!" :-D 

British model Gail Elliott

Gail Elliott represented the United Kingdom during the golden age of modeling in the 1980s.

 

In addition to several advertisements and magazine covers (mostly on British editions of various international fashion magazines), she appeared in the promotional video for Duran Duran's recording of the title song for the 1985 James Bond movie A View To a Kill.  

So, while she's not exactly a Bond girl, she came close to being one.

Gail Elliott remains active in fashion with her own clothing line, "Little Joe by Gail Elliott," which she founded in 2002.  It's based in New York and in Sydney, Australia.

Actress Denise Crosby

Bing Crosby's children include a nighttime soap actress (Mary)  and a golf champion (Nathaniel), but his granddaughter Denise kept the Crosby name going into the next generation . . . namely, on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." :-D 

   

She played security chief Tasha Yar on that show beginning in 1987, but she eventually grew disenchanted with the role, and when she decided to leave, the character was killed off after 22 episodes. She came back, though, to play Tasha's daughter, Commander Sela. She played another member of the Yar family, Dr. Jenna Yar, in the fan-produced series "Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II."  So she knows something about generations. :-D

Denise Crosby embraced her connection with the "Star Trek" franchise and produced and narrated Trekkies, the 1997 documentary about Star Trek fans, followed by a 2003 sequel, Trekkies 2.   

Fun facts: Denise Crosby is the daughter of Dennis Crosby (her name is a feminized version of her father's), Crosby's son by his first wife, Dixie Lee.  As for Mary and Nathaniel, and their brother Harry, they were Crosby's children by Kathryn Grant, Bing's second wife.  Denise, their half-niece, is older than all three of them. 

Talkin' 'bout their generations . . . 

French actress Carole Bouquet

That's "Bouquet," not "Bucket!" ;-) 

Like Catherine Deneuve before her, French film star Carole Bouquet is better known to most Americans as a spokesmodel for Chanel than as an actress.  This, of course, is because most Americans are too ignorant to appreciate French movies (though, if you're visiting this blog, you're probably not one of those morons).  But Carole Bouquet is known in particular to James Bond fans . . . as Bond girl Melina Havelock in 1981's For Your Eyes Only.  (In that movie, Bond - played by Roger Moore - properly introduces himself to Melina in a Citroën 2CV in the middle of a car chase. :-D)

Carole Bouquet, of course, has appeared in more substantial movies, in France and in other European countries.  Her big debut was as Conchita in Luis Buñuel's 1977 movie That Obscure Object of Desire; her character, a flamenco dancer from Seville, is desired by an aging Frenchman, whom she frustrates on a regular basis.  Other roles she's played include Babé Senanques in Rive droite, rive gauche (1984), Lucrezia von Planta in Jenatsch (1987) and Margherita in Donne con le gonne (1991). 

One of her better known roles was Florence Barthélémy in Too Beautiful For You (1989).  Florence is a beautiful woman whose husband - played by Gérard Depardieu - cheats on her by carrying on an affair with his much less attractive secretary.  In an ironic twist, Carole Bouquet dated the brilliant actor and noted tax evader for eight years - 1997 to 2005 - and they were engaged in the last two years of their relationship.  They worked together repeatedly.

Her only notable post-Bond Hollywood work was as Princess Soroya in "Life Without Zoë," Francis Ford Coppola's contribution to the 1989 short-film anthology New York Stories.  Carole Bouquet's failure to parlay her Bond girl experience into a Hollywood career may be seen as a huge failure by some, but I doubt she's complaining. 

Actress Karen Allen

Karen Allen first came to people's attention in 1978 with a role in National Lampoon's Animal House, a move praised by some critics as the funniest movie since Mel Brooks' The Producers (or so says Roger Ebert) and damned by others as the movie that changed Hollywood for the worse (because it kicked off an era of scatological frat-boy comedies that catered to the "young, dumb male" demographic).  Three short years later, she became an important part of cinematic history.

 

Karen Allen played Marion Ravenwood in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Marion was the smart, savvy  girlfriend of Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and the daughter of his mentor in the field of archaeology.  Ms. Allen reprised the role in 2008's Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, in which she and Indy rekindled their mutual romantic interest . . . and in which Indy found out that he was the father of her son.  Indy confessed to Marion that he'd dallied with several women, all of whom had one common flaw: "They weren't you." :-)  

Not too many people liked Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, but I did.  (Spoiler alert: Indy and Marion marry at the end.)  Nevertheless, Karen Allen has this distinction going for her - she's the only lead actress to appear in two Indiana Jones movies.         

Her various movie roles in between the first and (presumably) last Indiana Jones movies include Jenny Hayden in Starman, in which she befriends an alien from another planet (played by Jeff Bridges), Claire Phillips in Scrooged, the 1988 adaptation of "A Christmas Carol" (opposite Bill Murray) and Laura in the 1987 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (directed by Paul Newman).  She also a played a member of a yacht crew in 2000's The Perfect Storm. 

Of all the actresses who played Indiana Jones' love interests, Karen Allen has had the most distinguished career.  Because, like Marion Ravenwood, she has staying power. :-)