Actress and musician Katrina Law

Katrina Law is a young actress who has played many characters in both TV and movies.

She's best known, though, as Mira, a slave girl, in the ancient-history TV dramas "Spartacus: Blood and Sand" and "Spartacus: Vengeance," on Starz. 

But here are a couple of things you probably didn't know about Katrina Law.  Originally from New Jersey, she represented her home state in the Miss Teen USA pageant, and she's also the lead singer and bassist in a band called Soundboard Fiction.

Model/actress Vibeke Knudsen

Vibeke Kundsen is a Danish model and actress whose modeling career was active in the seventies.

It was also at this time that she appeared in French movies such as the mystery movie The Body of My Enemy, from 1976 (which starred the great Jean-Paul Belmondo), and 1977's Madame Claude.

Among the photographers she worked with was the controversial Helmut Newton.

St. Louis newswoman Kelly Jackson

Kelly Jackson is a familiar face to TV viewers in the St. Louis area.

She hosts the weekend edition of "Today In St,. Louis" on KSDK-TV, the NBC affiliate in that city.  She's worked at the station since 1998, except for a brief intermezzo at another station in Sacramento, California.

She's also a local advocate for pet adoption,  and she has a dog of her own, named LaRue.

Televsion actress Briga Heelan

Briga Heelan may just be one of the breakout TV stars of 2014.

Not only does she have a unique name, she stars in a new TBS sitcom, "Ground Floor," in which she plays a maintenance supervisor in a San Francisco office building who falls for a high-powered attorney working in the same building.

She's already familiar to TV viewers, having appeared in shows such as "Cougar Town" and "Jane By Design."

Like Mother, Like Daughter: Kate French and Joan Gocha

And here they are, ladies and gents - Kate French and her mother Joan Gocha, together in one beautiful shot! :-D

I'm not quite sure which is which. ;-)

Okay, that's Mom on the left, Kate on the right.  And in Kate's lap is her own child, her son Henry.  :-) The proud dad, not shown here, is Kate French's husband,  photographer Jon Johnson.  (He probably took the picture!) 

Model Joan Gocha

In my last post, I showed actress Kate French, whose mother I identified as a model named Joan Gocha. Well, having shown Ms. French, I now present the mom! :-)

Joan Gocha is a model who largely worked through the legendary Ford agency, which was known for producing a bumper crop of star models.  While Joan Gocha isn't a household name, she was definitely a top model in her own right.

The above picture of Ms. Gocha  is from a Mary Kay cosmetics ad.  The one below is from a clothing ad.

Actress Kate French

Kate French is an actress you might not have heard about . . . but you may very well have seen her.

While she hasn't had too many lead roles in movies and television shows, she certainly has appeared in a lot of them.  She's best known for her role as Sasha Miller in the cable teen drama "South of Nowhere" and for playing Niki Stevens in Showtime's lesbian drama "The L Word."  Her role as Emma in the 2011 film Language of a Broken Heart got her a Best Actress award nomination at the California Independent Film Festival.

Kate French owes her great looks to her parents, both models - Rob French and Joan Gocha.    

Model Gunnel Eriksson

Gunnel Eriksson is a fashion and beauty model who was active in the seventies and early eighties.

She worked in Europe in the 1970s, represented by the Talents agency in Munich and the Paris Planning Women agency in Paris.   

Ms. Eriksson is best known as a spokesmodel for Germaine Monteil, a New York-based cosmetics company founded by the French-born woman of the same name.  Both pictures of Ms. Eriksson shown here - including the especially adorable one showing her with a cat - are from the Germaine Monteil ad campaign. 

Television actress Pam Dawber

Pam Dawber was the star of the original Mindy project . . . specifically, the Mork and Mindy project.

She became a star on "Mork and Mindy," the ABC sitcom spun off a single "Happy Days" episode about Richie Cunningham's dream of encountering a zany space alien named Mork.  After that "Happy Days" episode aired, Mork - played by a young improvisational comic named Robin Williams - turned out to be so popular that "Happy Days" producer Garry Marshall built a whole TV show around that "dream episode" character.  For Pam Dawber, being cast in the female title role was a dream come true. 

She played Mindy McConnell, an aspiring journalist in Boulder, Colorado who met Mork, from the planet Ork, when his egg-like spaceship landed on the outskirts of town.  He came to observe Earth and didn't know anything about this planet; Mindy, as Mork's comedic foil, took him in as a roommate tried to explain life on the third rock from the sun to him . . . with hilarious results.  The show was a hit, lasting a respectable four seasons.

Pam Dawber also starred in a slightly less successful sitcom in the late eighties, "My Sister Sam," as Samantha Russell, a freelance photographer living with her kid sister Patti.  Rebecca Schaffer, who played Patti, became friends with Ms. Dawber, but she was later murdered by a deranged fan after the series ended.  The incident left Ms. Dawber devastated.

She continued to make TV movies into the nineties, eventually retiring to spend more time with her family.  She's married to "NCIS" star Mark Harmon; they've been together since 1987.   

Television actress Betsy Brandt

If you were among the many devoted fans of the cable-TV drug-crime drama "Breaking Bad," then you know who Betsy Brandt is.

Betsy Brandt played Marie Schrader, a radiologic technologist and the sister-in-law of Walter White, the cancer-plagued, crystal-meth-producing antihero of "Breaking Bad."  While her husband, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, was tracking an anonymous drug kingpin without knowing it was Walter, Marie struggled with a shoplifting habit and remained devoted to her sister's and Walter's family.

With "Breaking Bad" done on cable, Ms. Brandt moved to another genre - comedy - and another format - broadcast television.  She plays Annie Henry, Mike Henry's wife, on Michael J. Fox's self-titled sitcom on NBC.  While Mike returns to broadcast journalism, Annie works as a teacher.

Model Marta Bērzkalna

Marta Bērzkalna is a fashion model from Latvia.

She's best known for her runway work.

Among the designers she's represented are  Anna Sui, Chanel, Chloé, Christian Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Donna Karan,  Emilio Pucci, Givenchy,  Lanvin, and Louis Vuitton.

Actress Gabrielle Anwar

Although she was born and raised in Britain, and although she is most associated with a British role in a series produced by a Canadian company that aired on Showtime in the U.S., Gabrielle Anwar is very much an American actress, thanks to her roles in American movies and TV shows. (She's also an American citizen.)

Gabrielle Anwar is well known for her role as Princess Margaret Tudor in "The Tudors," the aforementioned series that aired on Showtime, about the House of Tudor that ruled England from 1485 to 1603.  (The series actually ended with the death of King Henry VIII in 1547.)  But for six years (2007 to 2013), she also played Irish Republican Army operative turned freelance commando Fiona Glenanne in the USA series "Burn Notice."  She first came to the attention of American audiences at 22 in the 1992 movie Scent of a Woman, as Donna, a girl who dances the tango with a retired, blind Army officer played by Al Pacino.

Fun fact: One of Gabrielle Anwar's earliest roles was in a Paul McCartney video - specifically, his promotional video for his 1986 single "Pretty Little Head."  She was sixteen years old at the time. 

Happy New Year

And so I begin another year of beautiful women to show you.  In fact, I have already found several subjects to feature for the first time in 2014, and I happen to have no fewer than pictures of 41 different subjects on tap.  However, thanks to a program which allows me to store pictures onto CDs that keeps malfunctioning and my increasing paranoia over storing data on my hard drive - because hard drives have a tendency to crash too often - I've been saving them on my Blogger.com account as drafts for this blog, and I have a mess of them - many of which are all typed up and ready go well into the new year.  I find it easier to look for subjects and photos in advance rather than looking as I go, but that means having to scroll down a lot just to get to the next entry ready for publication - a small price to pay for peace of mind. 

As for the women I'll be honoring . . . I'll still be honoring actresses and models, along with, hopefully, more athletes, but I'll have to be more careful when it comes to honoring newswomen.  Some of them have a corporate bias in their reporting, and  not just the ones on Fox News.  A few newswomen from other outlets have been called out for their flawed reporting, and a few of them have even shown blatant personal political biases that jibe with neither the facts nor my own political beliefs.  And business reporters are always tricky, because even the best, least biased, most professional business reporters, male of female, are still . . . business reporters.  Business reporters are more concerned with Wall Street than Main Street, and while a few of them have done a bit of cheerleading for the markets - only to be called on it by progressive media watchdogs - most of them simply report on high finance.   The bottom line is that some TV newswomen don't deserve to be included here because of their more unsavory biases, just as some actresses don't belong here because they can't act.     

And a certain "newswoman" on Fox News who wasted our time with discussions on Santa Claus's race will never be included here.  She wouldn't have been included here even if she hadn't opined on Santa's skin color.  Why?  Perhaps you weren't paying attention - she's on Fox News! 

But enough of my yakking.  A new round of beautiful women is coming.  Have a happy and beautiful new year! :-)