Canadian model/actress Shalom Harlow

Shalom Harlow is a model who has been active since she left high school.

The Canadian-born-and raised Ms. Harlow was discovered at a Toronto performance of the Cure, one of those bands you might associate with the sort of alternative values that don't go with haute couture. :-D  But that didn't matter, as Ms. Harlow turned out to have the perfect look. :-) 

How perfect?  Well, she's modeled for  Jones New York, Tiffany, Nautica, and Chloé, among others, and she co-hosted MTV's "House of Style" with another high-profile model, Amber Valletta.

She's also gotten into acting, having appeared in movies such as Vanilla Sky, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Melinda and Melinda.

Actress and singer Renée Elise Goldsberry

Renée Elise Goldsberry is currently the toast of Broadway for her work in Hamilton, the musical based on the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury.  It's a musical that uses hip-hop to tell Hamilton's life story, so if you're not into that sort of thing . . . well, there's still Renée Elise Goldsberry. :-D

She happened to win the 2015 Drama Desk Award and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.  As of this writing, she's still in the cast of Hamilton; she plays the role of Angelica Schuyler Church, daughter of American Revolution general Philip Schuyler; she was Hamilton's wife's sister.

Ms. Goldsberry has also been a fixture on television, having played Evangeline Williamson on the soap opera "One Life To Live" for four years beginning in 2003.  She's also had small roles on "The Good Wife" and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," but her main passions are theater and singing (she even played a singer om "Ally McBeal").   Her other Broadway roles include Nettie in The Color Purple and Nala in The Lion King.

Fun fact: Renée Elise Goldsberry is also a songwriter.  She composed more than half of the soundtrack for the 2001 romantic comedy movie All About You, including the title song, in addition to starring in that movie as Nicole.

TV newswoman Navideh Forghani

Navideh Forghani is a rpoerter for KNXV-TV in Phoenix.

Originally from Gainesville, Florida, Navideh Forghani grated from the University of Florida with a journalism degree and worked at the NBC affiliate in Augusta, Georgia as a reporter and as a weekend anchor.  She joined KNXV-TV, Phoenix's ABC station, in August 2011.

Specializing in multimedia, Ms.Forghani is most focused on investigative journalism, having uncovered a sex discrimination case in a local police department in the Augusta area.

She won several awards for her reporting work in Florida and Georgia and most likely looks forward to winning more of them in Arizona. :-)    

Model Kriss Evtikhieva

Kriss Evtikhieva is an up-and-coming model of the latest generation of cover girls.

She's represented by the Karins agency in Paris, and she's also been affiliated with the Option agency in Zurich. Biographical and professional data on her is scant, though she already has one big credit to her name . . . a beauty assignment with a more established model named . . . Catherine Roberts. 

Maybe you've heard of her! ;-) 

TV weatherwoman Ashley Dougherty

Ashley Dougherty is a familiar face in the Pittsburgh area, especially for those who watch the news on weekend mornings.  She does the weather forecasts on WTAE-TV on the morning reports every Saturday and Sunday.

She started meteorological career ar WTRF-TV in Wheeling, West Virginia in 2008 and eventually made it to Pittsburgh,  joining WTAE-TV, an ABC affiliate, in 2012.

According to the station's Web site, Ashley Dougherty enjoy playing golf and bocce.  She's also an animal welfare activist, and she helps to get cats and dogs adopted out of animal shelters. 

Model Anna Cleveland

Yes, she's Pat Cleveland's daughter. :-)

And, her father is Dutch photographer Paul Van Ravenstein, which means, if you've been paying attention to this blog recently, that top model Appolonia Van Ravenstein is her aunt.  So Anna Cleveland was destined to join the family business.

In fact, Anna Cleveland got into the modeling profession when she was four, appearing in a Moschino fashion show.  She and her brother even joined their mother in a Chanel show when Anna was only thirteen.

She's already accumulated a list of fashion shows to her credit that rivals the Dead Sea scrolls in length, and her editorial credits include assignments for Numéro magazine in France, the Italian edition of Vogue and the British and Spanish editions of Harper's Bazaar.

Fun fact:  Though her father is Dutch (she was born in the Netherlands) and her mother is American,  Anna Cleveland was raised in Stresa, Lago Maggiore, Italy, though her family moved to New Jersey was she was fifteen.  For the record, she turned 27 in March 2016.      

Her she is again, with her famous mother and fashion designer Stephen Burrows. :-) 

Model/actress Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer started out as a model in New York and quickly graduated to acting.

Originally from Australia, Ms. Bauer came to America in the 1970s and worked as a model for a time, doing ads for clients like Aziza cosmetics, and ad from which the photo above is taken.  By the end of the decade her acting career had started with a role in Winter Kills, a movie of political intrigue based on a Richard Condon novel. 

Her roles in the eighties included that of an alien woman living on Earth in Starcrossed, from 1985, Pat Lennon in 1987's The Rosary Murders,  and Dr. Juliette Faxx in the 1990 sequel to RoboCop (pictured below).  She also had supporting roles in movies like Flashdance and starred as the love interest of Jan-Michael Vincent in the pilot episode of the TV series Airwolf (but her character was killed off in the pilot). 

After the mid-nineties, Belinda Bauer retired from acting and became a psychologist.  She's based in Los Angeles. 

The Latest Numbers

I have now posted pictures of 961 different women on this blog.  And not only am I clearly going to make it to a thousand by the time this blog's tenth anniversary is marked this September, I'll have several more women to get to for the rest of 2016, as well as for 2017 and beyond.

This blog is going to be here for a long, long time.

Back with more new subjects soon.  

The Beauty of Retrospect: Joan Smalls . . . OMG!

I wanted to express in words my reaction to seeing this picture of model Joan Smalls in this Balenciaga number . . .

. . .but how do you type out an irregular heartbeat? :-D 

Talk about a long cool woman in a black dress!  With matching blue gloves?  She's so . . . so . . .

Is it getting hot in here? :-D 

Whew!  Well, that's it for my retrospectives of women I've - whew! - featured here before. Back in the new month with new subjects, after posting some updated numbers.

Oh . . . I need a cold drink . . . ;-)   

The Beauty of Retrospect: Paloma Picasso In Pink

Back in February, I showed a picture of model Pat Cleveland in a pink dress.  Here, below, is the only woman who could ever come close to being Ms. Cleveland's equal in sporting a pink ensemble.

And, while she is a fashion icon, she isn't a model. 

It is, of course, jewelry designer and fashion businesswoman Paloma Picasso, a woman (the woman?) who embodies European high culture and sophistication for us silly, provincial Americans.  And why not?  Not only does Pablo Picasso's famous daughter look stunning in a pink dress, the striped cape she wears around it, with hues of pink, purple and fuchsia, makes her look absolutely smashing!

Clothes don't make the woman, but they sure do help. :-)

The Beauty of Retrospect: Rosemary McGrotha in White Lace and Pearls

Rosemary McGrotha is best known as a muse of Donna Karan and is revered for projecting strength in her modeling assignments, be it for Donna Karan or editorials and other commercial clients.

A woman who projects strength, though, can still be soft and alluring.  And Rosemary McGrotha has had no trouble conveying either quality, as the photo of her below, in white lace and pearls, demonstrates.

But no matter what she wears, Rosemary McGrotha can always turn the strongest man into jelly with piercing steel-blue eyes of hers. :-D 

The Beauty of Retrospect: Julie Floyd

Just a couple of quick retrospectives to close out the month, starting with this post . . . of not one, but two pictures of Julie Floyd.

So what do you think is hotter than Julie Floyd in a polka-dotted Pino Lancetti outfit like the one above?

How about Julie Floyd in a Valentino outfit like the one below?! 

She sure knows how to strike a pose! :-D

The Pino Lancetti photo is from 1983, and the Valentino one is from 1985.

The Beauty of Anonymity: Exercise Model

This woman appeared in a photo accompanying an article in my local paper about exercising properly.

I thought she had a cute face, so I figured, why not scan it and feature it here?

As it's a stock photo, I am under no illusion that I will be able to identify her.  But if you, dear readers, know who she is, please let me know by leaving a comment on this blog entry.

I'm going to spend the remaining third of this month of April 2016 with some looks back at models I've previously featured.     

Boston TV newswoman Victoria Warren

If there's a Volkswagen dealer in the Boston area willing to talk to the press about the company's diesel scandal, he's probably talking to this VW. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Victoria Warren is a general assignment reporter for WHDH-TV, Beantown's NBC affiliate.  She has been at the station since 2006, after having worked at WJXT-TV in Jacksonville.  While at WJXT, Ms,. Warren, ironically, covered the New England Patriots' Super Bowl XXXIX victory there, as well as hurricanes threatening Florida.  

Fun fact:  Ms. Warren was raised in Staten Island, so some Bostonians may not accept her as one of them. Especially if she's a New York Jets fan. ;-)

Australian actress Rachael Taylor

Despite coming from Down Under, Rachael Taylor is a familiar face to American audiences.

She's done many television movies in the States, but she's also appeared in numerous American TV shows. Not all of her American television endeavors have been successful - ABC's "666 Park Avenue" and NBC's "Crisis" were both duds - but she did have a recurring role as Dr. Lucy Fields in ABC's "Grey's Anatomy."

While Ms. Taylor has done some small, well-received movies in her native Australia, like Cedar Boys, about young people of Middle Eastern descent living in Sydney, and Any Questions for Ben?   her most prominent role in the movies so far has been as Maggie Madsen in the first Transformers movie.  She did not return for any sequels.  

French actress Léa Seydoux

Léa Seydoux has been an ubiquitous presence in both American and foreign movies.

The young French actress has had roles in movies like Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris and The Grand Budapest Hotel.  But her biggest role to date may be Dr. Madeleine Swann in the James Bond movie Spectre, whom Bond is sent to protect.

Ms. Seydoux' most important work may well be in her native France. She received numerous award nominations all over the world for 2013's Blue Is the Warmest Colour, in which she plays an aspiring painter named Emma who changes the life of a free-spirited teenager named Adèle.  The two become lovers.  (It's a French movie, remember . . ..)

Another big movie for her was 2012's Farewell, My Queen, in which she played a servant to Marie Antoinette at the outbreak of the French Revolution who remains loyal to her in the aftermath of the outbreak of the French Revolution. She won the Best Actress award at the Cabourg Film Festival for that. 

Model Annette Roque

Annette Roque is a model from the Netherlands.

A face from the waning days of the golden age of modeling, Ms. Roque is best known for her advertising work for Revlon and for Victoria's Secret.

She married American television personality and "Today" host Matt Lauer in 1998 and is the mother of his three children. 

Spanish model Judit Mascó

Judit Mascó is a top model from Spain who first came to the attention of Americans in the early nineties.  And she came to the attention of American teenage boys first. 

You guessed it - she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustarted's 1990 swimsuit issue.  

After that, she became known for her fashion-magazine work, concentrating more on projecting herself as a woman that women wanted to be like than as a woman that men wanted to be with.  (Not that men still didn't want to be with her, of course.)   Thanks to that Sports Illustrated cover, she got advertising campaign assignments that included Laurèl by Escada, Armand Bassi, and Clairol, among many others.  The magazine covers she appeared on all over the world are too numerous to list here (different national editions of Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Woman, and Glamour are among them), but get this: She's the only Spanish model (and apart from Penélope Cruz, the only Spanish woman) to appear on the cover of the U.S. edition of Vogue.  

Judit Mascó currently involves herself in philanthropic causes such as Oxfam and kidney donation awareness, and she also hosted the reality television show "Supermodelo" on Spanish television in the late 2000s.  She currently hosts the program "Actívate" on the Spanish state-run TV network La 2.

Model Lynne Koester

Lynne Koester is another stunning face from the golden age of modeling . . . specifically, the eighties and the early nineties, the part of that age in which she was most active.

Her poses included everything from sporting edgy hairstyles to modeling equally edgy dresses.

One interesting fact about Lynne Koester is that she was the muse of designer Gianfranco Ferre.  Her son, Paolo Anchisi, is a model himself. 

You want to see his photo here?  Sorry, you got the wrong blog.  But you might find this link interesting . . .. :-) 

British actress Naomie Harris

If you've seen the two most recent (as of this writing) James Bond movies, Skyfall and Spectre, then you recognize Naomie Harris. She played Miss Moneypenny in both of those films.

The daughter of Caribbean immigrants to Great Britain, Ms. Harris is known in that country through roles on various television programs, but she's best known to moviegoers as the sorceress Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, as well as Selena in the apocalyptic virus film 28 Days Later.

One of her most prominent roles, however, was as Nelson Mandela's second wife Winnie in the 2013 biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom with Idris Elba in the title role. Winnie Mandela herself told Ms. Harris that she seemed to have channeled rather than played her, and Ms. Harris later said that Mrs. Mandela thought the performance marked  "the first time she felt truly captured on film."

High praise, indeed.

Actress Clio Goldsmith

Clio Goldsmith is a retired actress from the French branch of the European Goldsmith banking and financial dynasty.  But while her relatives and forebears have involved themselves in finance, politics, and scholarly pursuits (her father, Edward Goldsmith, was a prominent environmentalist and philosopher), she pursued a career in the movies.

  

She often played the femme fatale in movies like Honey, Miss Right, and her best-known film, The Gift, from 1982, in which she plays the title role - a high-priced prostitute hired as a present for a bank employee on the occasion of his retirement.

It's a French-Italian movie.  Don't tell me you're not surprised by that! :-D   

After only a few years - 1980 to 1986 - Ms. Goldsmith retired form the movies.  She was married to the late Mark Shand, a British travel writer, for nineteen years beginning in 1990, before they divorced.  

Fun fact:  Mark Shand was the brother of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.  So, for nineteen years, Clio Goldsmith was an in-law of Prince Charles. 

Ines de la Fressange, Again

Ines de la Fressange has also made a name for herself as a fashion designer and perfumer in France and elsewhere. She's very much the embodiment of French fashion and beauty culture . . . and French culture in general.

She so embodies France, in fact, that, in 1989, she agreed to be the model for Marianne, the female allegorical symbol of France.  This did not sit well with Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, who had signed her to Chanel and saw her as his muse.  They parted company as a result, with Lagerfeld dismissing Marianne as representing "everything that is boring, bourgeois, and provincial."

As anyone who's followed Ines de la Fressange knows, though, the honor was still well-deserved.

Ines de la Fressange

Do I have to explain who this is?

Ines de la Fressange is one of those models for whom the the term "supermodel" was coined, and she more than lives up to the term.  The first model to sign an exclusive contract with the house of Chanel, she became synonymous with not only the designer's institution but also with grace, beauty, class, and just about everything else Americans love about the French.  Well, among those Americans who actually love the French.  

The daughter of a stockbroker and an Argentine model, Ines de la Fressange has been represented by the Marilyn agency in Paris and the Ford agencty in New York.  She's also a member of what passes for the French aristocracy in the Fifth Republic these days; he paternal grandmother was a banking heiress.     

Despite her Frenchness and her aristocratic airs, I'm willing to bet that she could charm the socks off a Republican. :-D   

TV reporter Aixa Diaz

Aixa Diaz is a local reporter who reaches many markets.

She's what they call a "generic reporter" - she files reports from Washington, D.C. for Hearst Television, a consortium of local TV stations that may or may not be affiliated with a network.  Ms. Diaz, a native of Puerto Rico, has worked for WESH-TV in Orlando, WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, N.C., and WPTZ-TV in Plattsburgh, N.Y.  All are sister stations of the Hearst chain.

Aixa Diaz is also a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Actress Rachael Leigh Cook

Rachael Leigh Cook is another leading young actress in Hollywood.

Some of her best-known movie roles have been in remakes.  She starred in the hugely successful She's All That, a romantic teenage comedy that updated George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.  Ms. Cook played the Eliza Doolittle surrogate, Laney Boggs, to Freddie Prinze's Henry Higgins-based Zack Siler.  She also starred in the 2000 remake of Get Carter.

She's also made a lot of appearances in too many TV shows to list. 

Model Lise Brand

Lise Brand is a model from the 1980s. While equally adept with fashion shoots and beauty shoots, she was far more than elegant.  She had a fierce, edgy look comparable to  that of modeling legend Patty Owen.

Her ability to project strength or allure is reflected by these two photos.  The one on top shows her edginess - check out those leather opera gloves! - while the one below shows her soft side . . and her gentle blue eyes. :-)

A client of the Elite agency's New York and Los Angeles offices, she also worked in Paris and was represented by the City agency there.  

Actress Nicole Beharie

Nicole Beharie is an actress who, at 31 years of age as of this posting, already has an impressive résumé.

She made a strong impression in the 2008 movie American Violet, as a young working mother in Texas who is wrongfully accused of being and charged as a drug dealer . . . and then takes on the system to clear her name.  

Today, she stars in "Sleepy Hollow," an occult-oriented TV series about an FBI agent fighting evil with a resurrected Ichabod Crane; Ms. Beharie plays agent Abbie Mills. 

Model Claudia Abruzzo

Claudia Abruzzo is a fashion and beauty model from the late seventies and early eighties.

A client of the Wilhelmina agency in New York, she moved to Europe and was represented by the Talents-Inge Schuckmann agency in Munich.

March 2016 - Going Forward

The year 2016 is going to be big year on this blog, this being my tenth anniversary year on this piece of bandwidth.  In addition to to reaching the milestone of pictures of a thousand different women, and the massive retrospective series I have just finished up, I am planning more A-Z runs, my sixth series of beautiful dancers in December, and, before another series of beautiful women in popular music (likely in July), plus more looks back at women I've featured here before.

Sit tight for the latest A-Z run, starting tomorrow.  :-)

The Beauty of Retrospect: Leap Day Post!

And here they are, four gorgeous women who have been featured on my blog repeatedly and are here once again, together: from left, Rosie Vela, Patti Hansen, Rene Russo (below) and Beverly Johnson.

If this lineup looks vaguely familiar, that's because I earlier posted a picture of the same models (posing in the same order) that was taken years after this one.  This photo is from an editorial in the June 1978 issue of the American edition of Vogue, when all four women were at the peak of their modeling careers; the previous photo was an ad from Revlon's "Unforgettable Women" campaign of the 1980s.  By the eighties, Rosie Vela had become a singer and Rene Russo had become an actress; Patti Hansen and Beverly Johnson were still at their modeling peaks. :-)

I posted the 1980s ad back in 2008 . . . to be precise, on February 29, 2008.  Some things never change around here. :-)

Want to see the "Unforgettable Women" ad again?  Just click here. 

I come in like a lion for March with a brand-new A-Z round of fresh subjects.      

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Roberts Week, Part Five

Catherine Roberts remains as beautiful as ever, as this recent black-and-white photo makes clear.

Now based in Los Angeles, she continues to be popular with advertisers and with magazines, particularly for photos to illustrate articles.  She shows no signs of slowing down. :-)

That's it for my retrospective looks at famous models I've featured here before, one woman per week over four weeks.  But my retrospectives for February aren't done yet; after showing four women over the course of month, I will be marking February 29 - a date that occurs only quadrennially - with four women simultaneously. :-D  Check back then to see who they are.

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Roberts Week, Part Four

I mentioned that Catherine Roberts has appeared in TV ads, and you may have already visited her YouTube channel, a link to which is provided to the right on this blog's main page.  Here is a still from one of those ads, specifically from . . . an Aqua Velva commercial?

Well, yes.  In the commercial, Ms. Roberts plays the beautiful girlfriend of the gentleman using the product, the obvious point being that men who use Aqua Velva attract the most desirable women.

There may be something about Aqua Velva men, to paraphrase the old slogan, but there's also something about the women who love them. :-)   

P.S.  If you've seen this commercial . . . no, that's not her actual voice.  

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Roberts Week, Part Three

Here's Catherine Roberts at her most glamorous!

The photo is taken from a Max factor catalog.  A frequent spokesmodel of the Max Factor company, Ms. Roberts also did a television commercial for the cosmetics brand.

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Roberts Week, Part Two

Catherine Roberts' versatility as a model is reflected in this photo from a late-seventies lipstick and nail polish ad.

 

The soft expression in her face and the gentle subtlety in her magnificent eyes convey a sense of sweet, romantic innocence. :-)

The brand is L'Oreal, by the way, and the photo is from one of the those "L'Oreal Colors Your World" ads for lipstick and nail polish in colors named to represent different nationalities.  This is from an ad for the "England" collection.  I thought that "international" gambit L'Oreal went for in the late seventies was silly, and I said I wouldn't show photos from that series, but Ms. Roberts looks so ethereal here, I'm making an exception in this case.  :-)

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Roberts Week, Part One

Who's that wearing those fashionable eyeglasses?

It's Catherine Roberts, of course, fashion and beauty model extraordinaire, and my exclusive subject for this last full week of February, not to mention a perennial subject on this blog since I first featured her in December 2009.

Catherine Roberts is mostly known for modeling beauty products, but she also has a special knack for modeling mundane products like eyeglasses, as in this ad for Silhouette glasses (made by Avant-Garde Optics) from 1977, and making them look interesting. :-) 

In fact, her portfolio includes ads for cars, alcoholic beverages and frozen dinners.  Yeah, I'm still looking for those . . . :-) 

The Beauty of Retrospect: Maria Hanson Week, Part Five

The Maidenform Woman isn't turning up here.

I've long maintained that those Maidenform ads - five of which you've just seen - weren't all of what Maria Hanson was as a model, and I thought I'd underscore that point by closing my week devoted to Ms. Hanson with a picture of her as . . . herself.   

This photo is a picture of the lovely Ms. Hanson from a fashion editorial in the March 1977 issue of Harper's Bazaar.  Bob Stone was the photographer.

She may be the Maidenform Woman to some, but to me, she'll always be Maria Hanson, a beautiful model and a wonderful woman. :-) 

Next up - a week of Catherine Roberts, another beautiful model who's a wonderful woman.