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. :-)  

Another Round of Beautiful Women

It's 2013, and after a few looks back at a couple of the 654 women I've featured before, I'm ready to start a round of entirely new subjects.

Of the many new year's resolutions I've made for 2013, one is to have fewer posts reprising earlier subjects.  Relying too heavily on such posts is a good way to get lazy and become less challenged in looking for new subjects to feature.  If I devote an entire month to revisiting women I've already paid tribute to on this blog, which I've done before,  it'll give me far more time than I need to think of new names . . . and I'll let the need for coming up with new subjects go for too long.  With fewer retrospectives, I hope to become sharper and quicker in offering new (and lovely) faces on this blog.

Oh, there will be some retrospectives from time to time -   I still have plenty of pictures of previously featured women on file that I'm eager to put up here - but I want to try to tap more possibilities.  And with the rules and criteria I go by (see the "Criteria, Rules and Standards" page), that won't be so easy.  But it should be fun. :-)

So, without further ado, my next A-Z run begins . . . NOW!  (Well, in the post following this one, at least. ;-) )

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Roberts, By the Sea

I just featured Catherine Roberts in my most recent collection of retrospectives of models I'd featured before, along with Sheila Johnson, back in November 2012. So I asked myself, after having revisited Sheila Johnson twice after revisiting her in November, was it too soon to revisit Catherine Roberts again even once after having done so in November?

Of course not! :-D

Catherine Roberts was at her most ubiquitous as a model at about the same time Jimmy Carter was President, appearing in numerous ads for L'Oreal and Charles of the Ritz cosmetics.  This picture, depicting our heroine listening to the soft, wavelike sounds from a seashell, with the ocean in the background, is from an ad campaign for the latter cosmetics brand.

The setting looks like a natural one for her because it is.  Catherine Roberts is originally from Florida. :-)   

The Beauty of Retrospect: Sheila Johnson . . . Again!

I thought I was done showing photos of the extraordinarily, blindingly beautiful Sheila Johnson for awhile . . . until I came across these two pictures!

Both pictures shown here are from the August 30, 1981 edition of Fashions of the Times, the bi-annual fashion supplement of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. 

As noted in my essay, published on this blog's sister blog, Miscellaneous Musings, the New York Times Magazine fashion supplements were primarily where I discovered the opposite sex.  Sheila Johnson was one of those models I would often see in those supplements, much to my starry-eyed pleasure.

Don't ask me to name the designers of the clothes she's wearing here.  Remember, my interest in fashion models is less about the fashion and more about the models. :-)    

The Beauty of Retrospect, Special Post! - Sheila Johnson For Napier

Back in November 2010,  I posted an entry (click here for it) featuring no fewer than ten Napier costume jewelry print ads with the extraordinarily lovely Sheila Johnson.  I have featured other Napier ads - known for their comparative-degree adjective taglines ("Napier is Prettier," et. al.) - with Ms. Johnson as I have found them.  And  I couldn't help but smile when I found this one.  

You see, for those of you who haven't clicked on the link above yet, when I featured those ten Napier ads with Sheila Johnson together in one post, I wrote in that post, "Napier costume jewelry is more of a lot of things, but when Sheila Johnson modeled those bracelets, earrings, and necklaces, Napier was sexier."

Apparently, one copywriter at Napier's ad agency was way ahead of me on that assessment. :-) 

Sheila Johnson was easily the most gorgeous Napier model ever, and this is an ad campaign that included women such as Kelly Emberg, Rosie Vela, and Jane Hitchcock. 

Bill Helburn is the photgrapher that caught this cool expression. :-) 

Updates: January 2013

Before I continue - and I plan to do so with yet another post devoted to modeling legend Sheila Johnson - I have to post an update regarding my post from February 2010 that featured her.  In that post, I wrote that Ms. Johnson had "started a business in Alabama with her husband. She markets a product worn under clothing . . . "  I included a link to the company selling said product.

It turns out that the Sheila Johnson who started a company marketing a product to be worn under clothing is not the Sheila Johnson I've been featuring.  Both have the same name, and both were models, but there's no connection between the two women.  My apologies.  The original post has since been revised, and the mention of such a product has been deleted.

Also, I amended my "Criteria, Rules and Standards" page to add the note that the numbers on all statistical sheets shown here that pertain to the number of pageviews individual posts on this blog have received only go back to May 2008, the month that Blogger.com actually started collecting such data, and that this blog in fact was started in September 2006.

Thank you.    

The Beauty of Retrospect: Karen Graham For Estée Lauder

I know it's New Year's Day, and I ought to be looking ahead and all that, but since this isn't the first full calendar week of 2013, I thought I'd look back for the next few days and feature women I've featured before. Which, of course, gives me the opportunity to revisit perennial favorites like Karen Graham. :-)

I've lost count of all the Estée Lauder print ads Karen Graham posed for in the fifteen years that she was that cosmetics company's spokesmodel.  And I always seem to find more.  Though I normally don't show whole ads here, preferring instead to concentrate on the pictures from them, I thought I'd show these Lauder ads in full, as they both feature two pictures of Karen Graham each; one a large portrait, the other a smaller photo.

I don't know why the ad agency for the Lauder company felt it was necessary to include two photos of Karen Graham in a single ad.  But you won't hear me complain about it.  :-) And these two ads show how Victor Skrebneski is just as adept with color as he is with black and white - the vibrant colors in each pair of photos complement the respective maroon and peach backdrops of each ad perfectly, and Karen Graham looks as real and alive as if she were sitting next to you in the same room.  (Don't we wish!)         

The "Country Brick" ad is, as indicated in the copy, from 1975; the "Tea Garden" ad is from 1978.  The latter ad, showing Karen Graham with her hair softly fluttering in the breeze in the larger photo, is clearly the more casual of the two.  

No team was better in conjuring up comfortable bourgeois images than Estée Lauder's company and Victor Skrebneski's camera - I mean that as a compliment - and the magic continued after Karen Graham's stint as the firm's exclusive model was over.

Remember, you can click on each picture to enlarge either of them. :-)