TV newswoman Lisa Ling

Lisa Ling is a TV newswoman who's carved out a niche for herself by focusing on human interest stories.

She hosted "Our America" on Oprah Winfrey's network from 2011 to 2014 and has hosted CNN's "This Is Life" since 2014.  Both programs look at life in America outside the mainstream, the intent of which has been to cast light on the more colorful characters in the American fabric.

Ms. Ling has also been a host of of the acclaimed natural-history series "National Geographic Explorer" for seven years beginning in 2003, and she also used her experiences as a journalist to shed light on environmental issues, an example being the 2007-08 CNN documentary "Planet in Peril," which she co-hosted with other CNN reporters.

Ms. Ling first came to people's attention as a panelist on "The View," on which she appeared for three years beginning in 1999.

Fin fact:  Her younger sister Laura is also a journalist.

TV actress Ellie Kemper

Ellie Kemper made a big splash when she joined the cast of NBC's sitcom "The Office" in 2009.

She debuted as Erin Hannon, a nice, bubbly receptionist whose sweetness stood in stark contrast to the other characters in the Scranton, Pennsylvania-based sitcom about a paper supply company.  Erin even liked the least likable of her coworkers, including the very nasty Dwight Schrute.  Ms. Kemper played the role for the reminder of the series' run through 2013.

More recently, she has played the title role in an acclaimed sitcom called "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," in which she plays the title character.  Kimmy is a young woman from Indiana who, along with three other women, has been rescued from a doomsday cult after fifteen years of being held captive and locked away from the outside world.  She moves to New York City to start her life over with nothing more than positive attitude and ultimately gets a job as a governess for a disconnected socialite while befriending her street-smart landlady and rooming with an aspiring actor.  Really.

If you haven't seen "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" in your local TV listings, that's because it's a Netflix show.  Its final season just wrapped up.

Ellie Kemper has been a TV star for a decade at this writing.  In an age where TV stars are roosters and hens one day and feather dusters the next, it would appear that Ms. Kemper is as unbreakable as Kimmy Schmidt. :-) 

Model Ingrid Johnson

Ingrid Johnson is a model from the 1980s who was active on the West Coast.

She was represented by the California agency Top Models, which has offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and by the Wilhelmina agency's LA office. 

As these two pictures show, Ms. Johnson could look great in a color photo wearing a cloaking outfit and in a black-ans-white photo in an intimate-apparel top . . . only slightly undone. :-O

Strange that she never became a household name.

Carrie Ann Inaba

I couldn't list a single profession for Carrie Ann Inaba in the title of this blog entry, because she's done a lot of different things.   

She's been a dancer, an actress, a choreographer, a talk show host . . . lots of stuff.

Anyway, she's been a dancer in numerous movies, and her dancing and acting talents led her to appear in not one, but two Austin Powers movies.  She had a small role in 1999's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me in which Austin goes back to the 1960s, and she had a slightly larger role in 2002's Austin Powers: Goldmember, in which Austin finds himself in the 1970s.  In the latter movie, her character's name is . . . an expletive pun.  I won't repeat it here.

Ms,. Inaba got her start as one of the "Fly Girls" on the sketch-comedy show "In Living Color" (as did Jennifer Lopez, an earlier honoree on this blog), and, appropriately enough, she's a judge on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars."

And if that weren't enough, she's a co-host on CBS's lady chat show "The Talk," the Big Eye network's answer to ABC's "The View."

Fun fact: Ms. Inaba is of Irish, Chinese, and Japanese descent, having been born and raised in Honolulu.  As she was born in 1968, I can't help but wonder if she was named for the Hollies song "Carrie Anne," which came out a year earlier.  

British actress Nell Hudson

Nell Hudson has found fame on both sides of the Atlantic playing a role in an historical drama that, ironically, is a woman who didn't exist.

She played Nancy Skerrett, Queen Victoria's dresser, on the British ITV series "Victoria," aired in the United States on PBS.

While Queen Victoria did have a dresser named Skerrett, her first name was Marianne and she worked for the queen from 1837 to 1862.  In "Victoria," Nancy Skerrett quit to get married in the late 1840s or early 1850s (like so many fictionalized versions of history, the time frame of the series is loose) and died from drinking contaminated water shortly after her wedding.

In the series, she married the queen's chef, Charles Elmé Francatelli - who, it turns out, was a real person.

 

Nell Hudson, though, remains active on British television.  She's appeared on the period series "Call the Midwife" and in the crime comedy-drama series "Agatha Raisin."  She can also be seen on the BBC drama "The Informer," available in America on Amazon Prime Video.   

Beauty Tips for Women of Different Skin Tones

I guess it's true to say that ever since God created woman, all she has been interested in is looking good. Over time, she has come up with several ways and means all centered on improving her physical appearance. I'm talking potions, lasers, hair straighteners, lotions and many other techniques all in the name of preserving her beauty and enhancing it.

3 Reasons Why Ugly Guys Are Dating Pretty Women

You'll be walking down the street and you will see what the world considers an ugly guy with a pretty woman with he arm around him. You wonder why is this so? Here are 3 reasons.

Reason 1 He has drugs that she wants for free

Why Pretty Women Have It Better

Pretty Women. Do they have it easier than women who are less attractive? Well the consensus is, yes and no.

It's undeniable that pretty women have certain advantages over women who are considered to be 'not as pretty'. Pretty women are often times treated better overall because of their appearance, especially by men. It could be in a retail shop, a restaurant, bar and it's even said that attractive people are more likely to win out over a less attractive candidate for a promotion or even an initial job opening. And the lucky pretty ones can sometimes even talk their way out of a speeding ticket, but that also entails a degree of acting ability. Pretty women can even enter careers that are based solely on looks, such as modeling, that less attractive people can't ever consider as an employment option.

Texas TV newswoman Rachel Fackler

Rachel Fackler is one of the unsung heroines of broadcast journalism. She works at KETK-TV, an NBC affiliate operating on a UHF channel in Tyler, Texas, a small city a hundred miles east of Dallas.  She's also worked at KFXK-TV in Tyler, a Fox-affiliated sister station to KETK-TV. 

She started out as an intern at KETK and became a reporter in January 2013.  By July of that year,  she became a host of KFXK's morning program.

Ms. Fackler joined the morning news staff at KOB-TV in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she spent two years beginning in 2015 but returned to eastern Texas to get married.  Her husband. Kyle Roberts, is a weatherman at WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas.

Rachel worked as a freelance reporter for KTVT, the CBS affiliate in Dallas, but she's returned to Tyler to work as a fill-in anchor at KETK.

Mary Richards may have had spunk, but Rachel Fackler has pluck. :-)  

Doris Day: 1922-2019

Once again, I need to acknowledge the passing of a woman I have featured on this blog.  Actress and singer Doris Day, best known for he r wholesome comedy and musical movies, did this past week at the age of 97.  She had been in excellent health but recently caught a fatal case of pneumonia.

It is indeed, a sad loss.  My Doris Day post from August 2017 will remain on this blog, but I will not, in accordance with my rule against posts of women on this blog after their deaths, feature her again.  I plan to say something about her, though, on my regular blog.   RIP.  :-(

Actress Eliza Dushku

Eliza Dushku is an actress known primarily for her television work - most notably for her stint in a cult classic.

She starred as Faith in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the series about teenage girls chosen to fight the forces of supernatural evil.  Faith was a foil to and a rival of Buffy, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, but Faith often made the wrong decisions.  She also starred in "Angel," the spinoff about a vampire (Angel, the title character) tormented by a restored soul.

Her movie roles include a teenager named Gina, the girlfriend of a young man (played by James Franco) dealing with his past a in the 2002 drama City By the Sea and a role in 2007's Nobel Son, a black comedy about a family dealing with how to pay the ransom for the son after the father has won the Nobel Chemistry Prize.

An Albanian-American, Ms. Dushku turned documentarian with Dear Albania, a film in which she travels through different towns in Albania itself and also Albanian-majority towns in parts of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo.  She also co-produced the 2018 biographical film Mapplethorpe, about the controversial photographer of that name.   

Actress/dancer Leslie Caron

The term "living legend" aptly applies to Leslie Caron.

The French dancer started out in ballet but became a Hollywood sensation when Gene Kelly discovered her in the Ballet des Champs Elysées company in Paris and cast her as the sophisticated Lise Bouvier in the 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris.  She ended up getting an MGM contract as a result and moved to America to begin a long film career.

She starred in the 1951 historical thriller The Man with a Cloak, playing a Frenchwoman in 1848 new York during the revolution that brought Louis Napoleon to power in France, with Joseph Cotten and Barbara Stanwyck.  Still, her chief métier was the musical, and she starred in several of them in the 1950s - 1953's Lili with Mel Ferrer, the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs, the Cinderella retlling The Glass Slipper, also from 1955, and of course, Gigi, with Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier, from 1958.

She worked primarily in Europe after her fifties heyday, but she did appear in Father Goose with Cary Grant (mentioned earlier on this blog) in 1964, and she would even make appearances on American television, playing Nicole Sauguet in the nighttime drama "Falcon Crest."  Leslie Caron's roles at the turn of the millennium included a village window in the comedy-drama Chocolat and as part of the ensemble cast of an effort to reunite a World War II-era swing band in TV movie The Last of the Blonde Bombshells.

Ms. Caron's off-screen activities include a brief relationship with Warren Beatty (big surprise) and owning and operating a hotel-restaurant in France for sixteen years beginning in 1993.  Although a citizen of the world in the truest sense of the term, she obtained American citizenship in 2008 just in time to cast a ballot for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. 

Leslie Caron is still active as an actress, having played a countess in "The Durrells," the U.K. historical series about a British family living in Greece in the 1930s, in 2016.  Despite her success as an actress beyond her dancing abilities, she does have a beef with Hollywood. "Unfortunately, she once said, "Hollywood considers musical dancers as hoofers. Regrettable expression."

Model Christie Brinkley

I know what you're thinking - you're wondering what took me so long! :-D

Christie Brinkley was probably the most popular blonde fashion model of the 1980s whose name wasn't Kim Alexis, yet, after nearly thirteen years of running this blog I'm featuring her only now.  Well, better late than never!

Anyway . . . Christie Brinkley - whose surname comes from her stepfather, TV producer Donald Brinkley - didn't set out to be a model.  She was an art student who went to study in Paris, and a photographer happened to discover her.  The rest is history.

She has had a career that has just about covered every facet of modeling imaginable - five hundred magazine covers, including Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek and even Rolling Stone, ads for Cover Girl, Chanel, Breck, Revlon, Danskin and too many others to list . . . but her biggest claim to fame may be her numerous appearances in Sports Illustrated's annual guilty-pleasure swimsuit issue.  

She appeared on the covers of three consecutive annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues beginning in 1979, without any guilt.  And equally guilt-free teenage boys bought them.

She dabbled a bit in acting in the 1980s, including a bit role in the first National Lampoon's Vacation movie, but she became even better known for being singer-songwriter Billy Joel's second wife.  Joel was in fact her second husband.  A muse for his songwriting, she also designed the sleeve for his River of Dreams album.  She remained interested in acting, though, and in 2011 she would make her stage debut as Roxie Hart in the New York production of Chicago.

After nine years of marriage to Billy Joel, which produced one daughter - Alexa Ray Joel, who went into her's father's line of work -  they divorced, and in 1994 Ms. Brinkley married real estate developer Richard Taubman and had a son by him, named Jack. She remarried later on, in 1996, to architect Peter Halsey Cook and had another daughter, Sailor.  That marriage lasted twelve years.  Sailor Cook is also a model like her mom.

Any attempt to show a comprehensive collection of Christie  Brinkley's collection here would take up as much bandwidth as this blog already has taken up since I started it in 2006.   Consider these pictures a down payment on an overdue bill.  I promise there will  be more in the future.

Christie Brinkley's other endeavors have included her own jewelry line, a line a of skin-care products, and a line of eponymous eyeglasses.  But she's still best known as a model, and she has continued modeling into her sixties.  And in case you wonder if she still has it . . .

. . . uh, yeah, she does. :-)

Actress/model Jennifer Berrington

Jennifer Berrington started out as a child actress in Cary Grant's penultimate movie, 1964's Father Goose. She played one of seven schoolgirls in the care of a Frenchwoman, played by Leslie Caron, on a remote island in the South Pacific during the Second World War, who falls for an American - played by Grant - looking for someone else on the island.

Jennifer Berrington remained active as a model and as a commercial actress in her adult years.  The picture below is a still from a late-1970s beauty-treatment commercial.

Biographical data on Ms,. Berrington is scant.  Two things I was able to learn are that she is British and that her sister Stephanie was in Father Goose with her.  I post her picture here because, despite her obscurity, she's too lovely not to be included on this blog. :-) 

Model Carolyn Ameen

Carolyn Ameen is a model from the 1980s who was based in New York.

She was primarily represented by the Wilhelmina agency, though she was represented by the Elite Elegance offices in New York late in the decade.

One of her Wilhelmina comp cards described her hair color as "honey blonde," that exotic description no doubt a strong selling point for prospective clients. :-)  

Special Post: Pat Cleveland Needs Our Help

I'll start my new A-Z round of new subjects shortly.  But first, this special post . . .

Having promoted on this blog a GoFundMe campaign to help Spanish model Nastasia Urbano get out of a state of homelessness and start her life over - a campaign that proved to be a great success - I am now promoting another GoFundMe campaign set up by the husband of American model Pat Cleveland, whom I have featured on this blog many times.  I regret to report that Ms. Cleveland is suffering from colon cancer, and given the lack of safeguards in the modeling profession, and given also the high cost of medical insurance and medical care in the United States, Ms. Cleveland cannot afford treatment without financial help from her friends and fans.  Hence, this GoFundMe campaign.

       

As I've written before, Pat Cleveland is not just any ordinary model; she is a force of nature in the profession, and in a class by herself.  Anyone who's ever met her - this blogger included - knows what a lovely person as well as what a lovely woman she is, and she has long been an icon not just of modeling and fashion but of popular culture.  That's why everyone loves her.  And her friends and fans have shown that love by donating to this GoFundMe campaign to help her get the medical care she needs.

Alas, despite having raised over $138,000 with incredible rapidity, her husband, Dutch photographer Paul Van Ravenstein, has set a goal of $150,000.  This campaign began at the end of March, and after a month and change, it's still, to be exact, $11,466 short.  I have already donated to this campaign but I cannot afford to donate more.  As with Nastasia Urbano's GoFundMe campaign, I am publicizing Pat Cleveland's GoFundMe campaign in an effort to help get it to the $150,000 goal that her husband has established.  Quite frankly, due to the burst of donations that followed the start of this GoFundMe campaign, I thought I wouldn't have to promote it here after having done so on my Miscellaneous Musings blog in early April 2019, figuring that the $150,000 goal would be reached in a very short time.  That turned out not to be the case, and so I am here to ask anyone who can help Ms. Cleveland in her battle with cancer to do so.

This is a campaign I'm eager to promote, and for personal reasons.  Several relatives of mine have died of cancer and an uncle of mine has the same sort of cancer Pat Cleveland has and is fighting it like hell. I may not be able to do much for Ms. Cleveland, but I can do this.

You can go to the GoFundMe page for Pat Cleveland here.