One Million Pageviews!

Yesterday, February 27, 2014, the number of views of this blog surpassed the one-million mark.  My humble little blog, which began with absolutely no fanfare in September 2006, has officially hit the big time. :-)

  

To give you a better idea of just how significant that is for me, my regular blog, Miscellaneous Musings, in which I mouth off about anything that's on my mind, has been around since September 2002 and has gotten only a little more than 50,000 pageviews, which means that it's been getting one view for approximately every twenty views my beautiful women picture blog gets.  And, if you do the math, my regular blog has only gotten about 370 pageviews a month for 137 months so far, compared to 11,236 pageviews a month for 89 months for this blog!

So how do I intend to celebrate this blog's one millionth pageview?  Simple - I'm going to keep posting on it.  I have a new A-Z round starting tomorrow for March and April, with plenty of interesting women to be honored.  I already have the posts done as drafts on Blogger.com; I just need to publish them at the appointed times.  When this new round is done, I'll have posted - wait for it - pictures of eight hundred different women, proving that while beauty may only be skin deep, it's certainly widespread.  After that, I hope to take a break from two-month-long A-Z rounds.  For May, I hope to do another special month devoted to female athletes - the recently completed Winter Olympics have given me ideas, and there are several female non-winter athletes I hope to include - and then I'll probably devote the entirety of June to new pictures of previously featured women . . . i.e., retrospectives.  That it will be back to A-Z rounds for the start of the second half of the year, another all-retrospective month, and, in December, my fifth month-long edition of beautiful dancers.  (Every December, every even-numbered year. :-) )      

So be sure to check back me tomorrow as I come in like a lion for March with my 777th subject.  Thanks for all of your support. :-)  

The Beauty of Retrospect: Nancy Dutiel

Another eighties beauty named Nancy! :-) 

In her relatively short tenure as the Lancôme cosmetics company's U.S. spokesmodel, Nancy Dutiel left behind a a plethora of lovely pictures from that ad campaign, more than some models have in their entire portfolios.  In some of them, she looks rather regal, as in the photo above.  In others, as in the one below, she almost looks somewhat mischievous.    

Although her misfortune of preceding Isabella Rossellini (who's also been honored here) meant that she was forgotten almost as soon as she was replaced in 1983 - preceding Isabella Rossellini is even tougher than following her - Nancy Dutiel hasn't been forgotten here.  She's been a regular feature of this blog since it debuted in September 2006. 

And if there are any doubts as to whether she was a great model, the color photo below should erase all of those doubts.  

  

Don't you think? :-)

She was so great that, even when she was modeling for Lancôme, she found time to model for other clients, such as Neiman Marcus.  The photo below (the gentleman with her is male model Conrad Bell, for those who want to know) is from a 1980 ad for that store.

The fur department, of course. 

The Beauty of Retrospect: Nancy Donahue, 1982

Attentive followers of this blog are aware that I connected with eighties supermodel Nancy Donahue through social media and met her in person after having originally featured her here in early 2010.  Thus, she's now someone I know personally, and so I now normally refrain from featuring her on this blog per my own ground rules. But when I find a picture of her that's too good not to share here, I make an exception. Well, here are two exceptions. :-) 

The above photo, from 1982, features Ms. Donahue in one of the most intense poses she's ever struck, captured magnificently by the Italian fashion photographer Renato Grignaschi, and brilliantly bringing out the color in her eyes.

The second photo is from the same time, in which she offers a pose that is less intense but no less captivating.  

So, there are in fact pictures that violate my own rules that are worth making exceptions for. :-) 

The Beauty of Retrospect: Dianne deWitt

Dianne deWitt is one of those legendary models for whom the term "model" doesn't go far enough to describe her.  Like Pat Cleveland, she's a force of nature all her own.

Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this!

I ask you, how many models can you think of who could strike such a pose? :-)    

The Beauty of Retrospect: Catherine Deneuve, In Vibrant Color!

And it doesn't get better than that. :-D 

This picture really beings out the platinum-like sheen of Catherine Deneuve's hair. It's almost like . . . an aura. :-)

I forget where I found this picture, but I presume it was taken sometime during the seventies. 

The Beauty of Retrospect: Kathy Davis in Color!

My original entry for California model Kathy Davis, posted in May 2011, featured a black-and-white photo of Ms. Davis with her left hand to her head and her hair brushed to her left.  Here's a color version of that same photo.

The photo, it turns out, is from an ad for Climatress, a brand of - you guessed it - hair care products.  And Kathy Davis certainly has the right hair to advertise such products.  Maybe that's why she did so many hair care ads. :-) 

The Latest Numbers (And Statistics)

I have now posted pictures of 776 different women.

I try to add a hundred women from one anniversary of the day this blog went online to the next, and the anniversary date is September 25.  I'll have eight hundred different women on this blog long before this September 25, so this may allow me to devote more time to reprising women I've already featured.  I'll be doing some of that for the rest of February - all of the women I'm revisiting before March 1 have surnames ending with the letter D, which started out as a coincidence and became deliberate - but I will in fact be starting another A-Z round for March and April.

In the meantime, here are the statistics for the ten most popular posts to date.

No change from last time in terms of who's up and who's down.  

Back later with those "D-list" retrospectives.  

Fashion model Eva Wallen

Eva Wallen is another model from the golden age of fashion modeling - namely, the late seventies and the eighties.

She worked mainly in Pairs and New York, and she was represented by the Elite agency in both cities.  She was also a client of the L'Agence agency in Paris. 

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Prime Minister of Denmark

So, who was that attractive woman exchanging pleasantries with President Obama at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in South Africa?  She's the prime minister of Denmark, a country known for having a lot of happy and healthy people.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt has been the prime minster of the small Scandinavian monarchy since 2011, and she's been the leader of the Social Democratic Party in Denmark since 2005, the first woman to hold either post.  (Incidentally, she is at the service of another woman, Queen Margrethe II.)   He most notable achievements during her tenure as Denmark's head of government so far includes a rollback of anti-immigration legislation passed by the previous government as well as lowering taxes on wages and reforming welfare to increase economic productivity.

Her "selfie" photos taken with President Obama and British Prime Minster David Cameron at the Mandela memorial aroused some criticism over their appropriateness, though the memorial itself was more of a celebration of Mandela's life than a solemn ceremony.  Her looks aroused some rather misogynistic reactions in the American press - was she "flirting" with the President and the British Prime Minister?  No.  She was merely socializing with them.  As far as her physical attractiveness . . . hello? She's Danish!  Everyone in Denmark is good-looking!  That's because they're so happy and healthy.     

Fun fact:  Her husband is Stephen Kinnock, son of former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.  

Actress Jurnee Smolett-Bell

If you ever saw the high school football TV drama "Friday Night Lights," you've likely seen Jurnee Smolett-Bell. She played Jess Merriweather, a high school student dating a boy who plays for the school team to avoid juvenile detention.

Jurnee Smolett-Bell has appeared in numerous other TV shows, and at this writing, here most recent role was as Heather Hall in "Parenthood."  Heather was the manager of Kristina Braverman's campaign for mayor of Berkeley, California, where the show is set.  Alas, Kristina (played by Monica Potter, who has appared on this blog before) lost.  But Jurnee Smolett-Bell is a winner of an actress with a brilliant future.

Originally known as Jurnee Smolett, she married musician Josiah Bell in 2010.   

Actress Theresa Russell

Theresa Russell has often played the mysterious woman in many movies.

She gained notoriety in 1980 in the psychological sexual thriller Bad Timing, in which she played a woman doomed by a fatal affair with a psychiatrist (played by Art Garfunkel).  The movie was so sensually sensationalist that it garnered hostility in the United States, at a time when cultural conservatism was on the rise.  Ms. Russell eventually married the movie's director, Britain's Nicolas Roeg, and went on to star in more of his movies (such as Insignificance, Eureka, and Aria), though they later divorced. 

One of her best known parts was the title role in Black Widow (1987) about a femme fatale who seduced wealthy men into marrying her before killing them.  It's considered by many to be a high-water mark in her career.

More recently, she's had supporting roles in TV series, including the 2005 cable miniseries Empire Falls, about a dying town in Maine.

Fun fact:  Pete Townshend of the Who claimed to have written the 1982 Who song "Athena" about her.  

Actress/comedian Amy Poehler

Who says beautiful women can't be funny?

Like Tina Fey (an earlier honoree on this blog), Amy Poehler is an alumna of "Saturday Night Live," where both women worked together.  Ms. Poehler was a cast member from 2001 to 2008, and she appeared  in a few movies during the two thousand zeroes as well, including two movies with Ms. Fey - Mean Girls and Baby Mama, the latter starring Ms. Poehler as an immature surrogate mother.

Since 2009, she has starred as Leslie Knope, deputy director of the Parks and Recreation department of fictional Pawnee, Indiana in the NBC series "Parks and Recreation," in which she deals with all the inevitable pitfalls of making a small municipal bureaucracy work.  

Model Veronique Nogris

Veronique Nogris is a model who is active in the early 1980s.

She was represented by the Karins agency in Paris in 1980 and 1981.

Fashion model Esmé Marshall

Esmé Marshall was destined to be a top model in the 1980s.  You might say it was a "Marshall plan." :-)

The daughter of a photographer and a Chanel model, Esmé (who went by just her first name during her career) had an unorthodox upbringing.  She lived on a farm with her mother and lived in a commune with her father (her parents parted when she was little), and she helped her mother at one point with stuffing envelopes for an anti-war group.  She graduated from an alternative-education high school at 16, all the while being warned by her mom not to follow her into the modeling profession.

But once she was discovered in a department store, destiny called.

Esmé appeared on every magazine cover and in every fashion editorial that mattered, her striking brunette looks capturing the attention of photographers such as Rico Puhlmann, Stan Shaffer, and Arthur Elgort.

And, more recently, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

  

This is Esmé Marshall today, photographed as part of the About Face documentary project Mr. Greenfield-Sanders did on legendary models, which included the 2012 movie of that name.

And, if you ask me, she's still got it. :-)   

Fun fact: Esmé Marshall was named for the title character in J.D. Salinger's short story "For Esmé - with Love and Squalor."