The Beauty of Retrospect, Television Actress Edition: Monica Potter

I'm revisiting Monica Potter on this blog, but not just to illustrate her ability to look sexy in a strapless dress. :-)

Since I originally featured her, Monica Potter has gone on to star as Kristina Braverman, a mother of a small boy with Aspberger's syndrome, in the TV drama "Parenthood." Kristina is married to Adam, the older son in the Braverman family.

The Beauty of Retrospect, Another Supermodel Edition: Nancy Donahue

Occasionally, I like to show pictures of high-profile fashion model Nancy Donahue on my blog to remind followers why she took the modeling world by storm in the early 1980s.

She's taking the world by storm again with her new fitness/beauty product, and she's been going all over America to promote it. Again, visit her product's Web site to find out more about it.

Nancy Donahue is not only a beautiful woman, she is a wonderful person. That explains why she's lasted so long in the modeling business. :-) Things are always looking up for her . . .

. . .like in the picture above.

The Beauty of Retrospect, Anniversary Edition: Fanny Ardant

I promised a picture of the first woman I ever featured on this blog, four years ago. I'm not going to show you a picture of that woman, French actress Fanny Ardant.

I'm going to show you two! :-D

As noted in my original post, Fanny Ardant was discovered by the great movie director Francois Truffaut and was in his last two movies. She's gone on to become a major star in France; her films include Next Summer, Colonel Chabert, and Ridicule, among so many others. Her more recent movies include 8 Women, where she joined actresses such as Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart in what amounted to to the French equivalent of an all-star cast.

She also appeared in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina in 1995, and she has done other English-language movies as well. Other Fanny Ardant movies include the trilingual Callas Forever, in which she played opera star Maria Callas.

The Latest Numbers

As of today, I have posted pictures of 386 different women on my blog.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the day I started this blog. It started almost by accident; I had been contributing to a "beautiful women" picture thread on a message board, and I accumulated plenty of pictures I didn't know what else to do with. As I already had a blog on the Internet, I thought, why not post these pics on a blog of their own? The rest, as they say, is history. The total of 386 women so far translates to an average of 96.5 women per year, for those interested in statistics.

Tomorrow, I'll post a picture of the very first woman I featured here - and it's not Karen Graham. :-) You can see who it is just by going to the September 2006 archives page. Tune in tomorrow! :-)

The Beauty of Anonymity: Unidentified Erno Laszlo Model

This photograph is from an ad from the late 1970s for the Erno Laszlo beauty product company. I think the model featured is one of the most stunningly beautiful women I've ever seen.

The only problem is, I have no idea who she is. :-O

I've asked around on the Internet, and I've been told whom it might be, but no one seems to know. So while it might be one model or another, I can't really identify her for sure.

If anyone knows the name of this model, please leave a comment on this post. Any help is greatly appreciated. :-)

Actress Natalie Zea

Natalie Zea is a well-known face to regular viewers of American television.

Her best known roles are as Gwen Hotchkiss on the NBC daytime serial "Passions" and as Karen Darling on the ABC series "Dirty Sexy Money."

Actress Sela Ward

Sela Ward has been a fixture of television and movies for several years, and she is best known for two TV roles from the nineties - as Teddy Reed on the drama series "Sisters" (where every sister had a cutesy-pie masculine nickname - Teddy, Frankie, et al.) and as Lily Manning in another drama, "Once and Again," about an ongoing romance between two single parents.

The Mississippi-born actress - whose name is in fact an anagram of "seal draw" :-D - was, as of July 2010, slated to appear as a regular on "CSI: NY."

Her feature movie credits inclide Nothing in Common, The Fugitive and 54. She also played the ill-fated TV newswoman Jessica Savitch in a TV movie.

Actress Lisa Vidal

Lisa Vidal has been a consistent presence in Hollywood for several years. While she has been in movies, she's mostly associated with television.

She played Dr. Sara Morales in the police/firefighter drama "Third Watch," and she now plays the First Lady of the United States, Christina Martinez, in a new thriller series on NBC titled "The Event," about a high-level coverup.

Actress Hunter Tylo

Hunter Tylo is an actress best known in the world of soap operas (oops, daytime dramas - I owe Miss Marshall a quarter! ;-) ), as she plays Taylor Hayes Forrester in the CBS show "The Bold and the Beautiful." I don't know about her boldness, but she certainly has beauty. :-)

Ms. Tylo has done several TV spots endorsing several beauty products - of course - during her career.

Fun fact: One of Hunter Tylo's most memorable commercials was made just as her acting career was taking off. In an ad for DifRinse, a water-rinseable cold cream, she played a whiteface circus clown who removes her makeup with the product. The surprise is that you only realize she's a woman after she's also removed her bald-wig headpiece and let her hair down. (Well, that ad must have made a lot of young men want to run away and join the circus! ;-) )

Actress Cybill Shepherd

When a model from Memphis named Cybill Shepherd starred in Peter Bogdanovich's now-classic 1971 movie The Last Picture Show, it became readily apparent that she was not just another pretty face - a point of fact she confirmed in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid a year later.

Despite several movie roles, she's best known these days for television roles such as detective Maddie Hayes in the eighties series "Moonlighting" (the show that introduced us to Bruce Willis) and as struggling actress Cybill Sheridan in her own nineties sitcom "Cybill." More recently, she has had a recurring role in Showtime's "The L Word."

She's also done TV movies, including two spectacular turns as Martha Stewart. :-D

Actress Christina Ricci

Although Christina Ricci earned a reputation for cute films such as Casper and That Darn Cat as a child actress, it was her pair of performances as Wednesday in the Addams Family movies that set her on her trajectory as an adult actress.

She has played unconventional roles with dark undercurrents similar to Wednesday Addams, some of the best-known examples being the troubled Wendy Hood in The Ice Storm in the late nineties, as well as roles in 2003's Monster and 2006's Black Snake Moan.

She's an actress whose movies normally aren't for the faint of heart. :-O

Actress Kathleen Quinlan

Kathleen Quinlan first attracted people's attention at the age of nineteen, when she played Peg in George Lucas's nostalgia picture American Graffiti.

She has appeared in over fifty movies and on several television shows. Her best-known movie roles include the schizophrenic Deborah in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Marilyn Novell, the wife of an astronaut, in Apollo 13, and Anne Anderson in the 1998 movie A Civil Action.

Kathleen Quinlan also appeared in a small movie called Independence Day, an intimate drama that has nothing to do with the Will Smith sci-fi movie of the same name.

Actress Mary-Louise Parker

Mary-Louise Parker is an actress who has left an indelible presence in both the movies and television.

Her movie credits include Fried Green Tomatoes, Grand Canyon, The Client and Boys On the Side.

Her television roles included a recurring role on NBC's White House drama "The West Wing," as women's rights activist Amelia Gardner, who was a love interest for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman. Since 2005, Mary-Louise Parker has played Nancy Botwin, a suburban widow who grows and sells marijuana in "Weeds," which has won her both an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Television personality Candice Olson

Candice Olson is a renowned Canadian home decorating expert and interior designer who hosts the home makeover show "Divine Design With Candice Olson," which airs on the W channel in her home country of Canada and on Home and Garden Television in the U.S.

She has her own line of home decorating products, including a wallpaper line.

Model Kim Newby

Kim Newby is a top fashion model from the 1980s.

She was associated with the HV modeling agency in New York.