The Beauty of Retrospect: Margot Robbie

In August 2013, when I first featured Australian actress Margot Robbie on this blog, I noted that she was "in negotiations" to be in the cast of the Will Smith movie Focus, due out later in 2014.

Well, Margot Robbie is appearing in Focus, but in the meantime, she's appeared in the Martin Scorsese movie The Wolf of Wall Street, about crooked stock trader Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), as Belfort's glamorous trophy wife Naomi - his second wife.

Actually, the real Mrs. Belfort #2 was named Nadine, so Scorsese took some liberties with Belfort's life story (and several other things).  And, although The Wolf of Wall Street was a rather excessive movie, Margot Robbie as Naomi is still a pleasure to watch.  She makes it better simply by being in it.     

The Beauty of Retrospect: Amy Robach

Since I featured Amy Robach in October 2011, the then-NBC newswoman has experienced some changes in her life . . .though not all for the better. 

On the plus side, she moved to ABC's "Good Morning America" in 2012, becoming a contributing correspondent and substitute anchor, before becoming the main news anchor in 2014 after Josh Elliott left.  This was a big boost for her career.

On the minus side, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2013, and in announcing her illness on the air, she sought to bring the importance of breast cancer awareness and mammograms to more women's attentions.  She had a double mastectomy early in 2014.

She is one tough, brave woman. 

The Beauty of Retrospect: Crystal Egger

When I originally posted a blog entry for TV weather forecaster Crystal Egger in October 2010 - which has since become the fifth most popular post on this blog, as of this writing - she was a prime-time on-camera meteorologist at The Weather Channel.  

But in September 2013, she left the Atlanta-based cable channel, joining KNBC-TV in Los Angeles a month later.

Why would she leave a nationwide cable channel for a local NBC station in LA?  Perhaps you weren't paying attention: The Weather Channel is based in Atlanta!

Ha ha!  Well, one could argue that Crystal Egger is better off, because LA has better weather than Atlanta - and that certainly makes her job easy, being able to report forecasts of sunny skies with mild temperatures for most of the year. And since The Weather Channel, like most cable channels, has a small audience, Crystal Egger probably reaches more viewers in the Los Angeles metropolitan area than she would have if she remained on cable. 

The Weather Channel and KNBC-TV are both NBC Universal stations, so she stayed in the corporate family.  

The Beauty of Retrospect: Margaret Brennan

Margaret Brennan has been going places in broadcast journalism since I last featured her on this blog in August 2007.

She moved to Bloomberg Television in 2009, anchoring the 10:00 AM Eastern hour on the news channel, and she eventually got to host her own show, "InBusiness With Margaret Brennan," which covered international news affecting the markets.

In July 2012, she joined CBS News, where she has been since.  She is primarily the network's State Department correspondent, but she's also been a substitute anchor on "CBS This Morning" and the CBS Evening News. She was one of the few American news correspondents reporting from Tehran during the 2012 Non-Aligned Movement, which was the biggest international gathering in Iran since the mullahs overthrew the Shah.

The Latest Numbers

I have, as mentioned in my previous post, featured eight hundred different women on this blog.  So I suppose congratulations are in order.

Are there any women I have featured here that I have since regretted including?  Regrets . . . I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention.  I'd probably have even more regrets if I weren't so selective in the first place.

In the meantime, here are the numbers for the ten most popular posts on my blog - no change in the posts or the positions, all the same as before.  Click on the image to see it better.

Among my more recent posts, I've noticed that my March 2013 post of AccuWeather meteorologist Stef Davis - who, I believe, does on-camera forecasts only for AccuWeather's Web site - is surprisingly one of the more popular subjects among more recent posts, garnering 130 pageviews as of today.  But my first post of Italian veteran model Alda Balestra - also from March 2013 - is easily my most popular entry of the past couple of months, with 251 pageviews as of now.  It remains to be seen, though, whether these posts or any other posts can break into the top ten.   

For the rest of this month, I'm revisiting women I've featured before - four in all, three news media personalities and one actress - who have had dramatic career changes since I last featured them, which is precisely why I'm revisiting them.  Then I'll be featuring another series of athletes in May, followed by a month of retrospectives for June.  Back soon with those four retrospectives I just mentioned.

The Beauty of Anonymity: Stock Photo Model

I found this photo of a very attractive woman on the home page for Internet service provider Comcast Xfinity.  The Web news story it was used for was about - of course - beauty. :-D So naturally, I had to include it here. 

I've featured many unidentified models of this site, some of which have been identified since by my loyal followers, while others have remained unidentified.  This young woman will probably remain forever unidentified as well.  Or, maybe not.  As this is a recent stock picture for a feature that ran in early 2014, it's quite possible that someone knows who she is - maybe the model herself will find her own photo here.  

Tell me, tell me, who is she? 'Cause I really wanna know.  If you know, leave the answer in the comment section underneath this post. :-)

And if you know her personally, then please contact her to tell her that she's the eight hundredth woman on my blog - a new milestone for me. :-D 

Model Caroline Williams

Caroline, yes! :-) :-D

Caroline Williams is a London-based model from the 1980s.  And she certainly has a lot of that city's stately elegance.  All of her work from that decade was through three London modeling agencies.   

She was represented by the Freddie's agency in 1982 and 1983, but she then moved to Take Two, which she mostly worked through for the rest of the decade . . . though she also modeled through the Nike Clark agency in 1989.

The color photo is from 1982; the beige-tinted black-and-white photo is from 1987.  

Actress Mae Whitman

Mae Whitman is the only adult actress on the acclaimed NBC series "Parenthood" who plays a third-generation character, i.e., a grandchild of Zeek and Camille Braverman.  That is, since Sarah Ramos left the regular cast and thus cut back on her role as Haddie.

As for Mae Whitman, we've watched her character Amber Holt grow up and evolve from a troubled teen to a devoted cousin and daughter and to an independent young woman.  And, as Amber's kid brother Drew has already found out, she's the kind of sister you want standing by you. 

Mae Whitman started acting when she was six, appearing as the daughter of Meg Ryan's character in the 1994 alcoholism drama When a Man Loves a Woman; later, in 1996, she played the daughter of the President of the United States in the sci-fi war film Independence Day.  She's since appeared in many films, racking up a list of titles too numerous to include here, but she also played recurring characters in TV roles, such as Sara Wilmette in "Chicago Hope" and Ann Veal in "Arrested Development."

Mae Whitman also followed in the footsteps of her mother, voice artist Pat Musick, by doing voices or animated movies and TV shows.  

Model Valerie Vidal

Valerie Vidal is yet another model from the late seventies and early eighties (the best period in modeling!).

And I get to show pictures from her portfolio in both black and white and in color! :-)

She modeled through the FAM agency in Paris in 1979.  By 1983 she was with Zoli in New York.

Actress Tamlyn Tomita

Tamlyn Tomita first came to people's attention as a love interest for Daniel LaRusso (played by Ralph Macchio) in the 1986 sequel to The Karate Kid.

Since then, she has appeared in other movies, such as  the 1993 adaptation of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (in which she played the American-born daughter of a Chinese immigrant) and the 2004 climate-change sci-fi disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow (as a meteorologist), but she has also been a ubiquitous presence on various TV shows, playing various one-shot and passing roles in series such as "Quantum Leap" and "The Mentalist."

Fun fact:  Tamlyn Tomita was born on the Japanese island of Okinawa to a Japanese-American father and a part-Filipino mother.  Ironically, Okinawa is where her breakthrough movie The Karate Kid - Part II was set. 

German actress Hanna Schygulla

Hanna Schygulla is an actress whose beauty is as edgy as many of the movies she's made.  

Her most famous role may be the title role in 1978's The Marriage of Maria Braun, about a German woman who marries a Wehrmacht soldier during World War II and who remains devoted to her husband through a twisted series of affairs after the war.  Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, it's one of those movies that can never be adequately described.  You have to see it for yourself.

She's done other high-art movies in Germany, such as 1974's Effi Briest (also directed by Fassbinder), based on a novel about a young woman married off to an aristocrat, and she's even done Hollywood fare like The Delta Force, as a stewardess on a hijacked plane. 

A resident of Paris since 1981, Hanna Schygulla has pursued a second career as a chansons singer.

Model Melonee Rodgers

Melonee Rodgers is a model from the late 1980s.

She started out at the L'Agence modeling agency, which has offices in Atlanta and Miami, before joining Elite.  She was represented by both the Model Management and Runway divisions of the Elite agency, both in the New York offices.  :-)

Phoenix TV newswoman Katie Raml

Katie Raml is an anchorwoman for the newscast of KNXV-TV, the ABC affiliate in Phoenix, Arizona.

She started out as a general assignment reporter at KNDU-TV in Kennewick, Washington, eventually becoming a morning anchor there.  Having grown up in Phoenix, she returned to her hometown in 2001 to become a reporter at KNXV-TV.  She's been an anchorwoman on that station since 2002. 

She anchors the news at four different times - 4:00 PM, 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM. So she's obviously very busy!

Fun fact: Ms. Raml earned a real estate license to better understand the housing market better.

Model Pam Piper

Pam Piper is a fashion model from the 1980s.

She was represented by three different agencies between two cities.  In New York, she was with Zoli from 1983 to 1984 and with Name from 1987 to the end of the decade.  In between, she worked in Paris, where she was with the Crystal agency.

German model Tatjana Patitz

The long line of German beauties in the modeling trade that began with Margrit Ramme (a favorite subject on this blog) and Evelyn Kuhn in the sixties and seventies continued into the eighties and nineties, thanks in part to Hamburg native Tatjana Patitz. :-)

After beginning her modeling career at the age of seventeen (as of this writing, she's 48, for the record), Tatjana Patitz went on to grace over two hundred magazine covers worldwide.  She appeared on the cover of U.S. Vogue seven times and the cover of British Vogue eleven times. She's also done fashion and beauty TV commercials for L'Oréal, Revlon, Dockers and Ralph Lauren, but she's also done TV ads for utilitarian products such as DuPont carpets and the Opel Corsa, a General Motors car made and sold in Europe.

Since 2009, Tatjana Patitz has represented the Italian fashion brand Marina Rinaldi; the picture immediately above is taken from a Rinaldi ad.

Fun fact: Although she was born in Germany, she was raised in Skanör, Sweden.

Actress Lupita Nyong'o

Well, we should all know who this is by now, shouldn't we? :-D

Lupita Nyong'o became an overnight sensation for her portrayal of the slave Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup, a black freeman from upstate New York kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.  Yes, she won the 2014 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work, but she was nominated for 31 other acting awards for the same role - too many to list here - and won all but nine of them.  (Curiously, the Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe award was one of the nine she didn't win.)

Born to a Kenyan college professor and his wife in Mexico City, Lupita Nyong'o grew up in both Kenya and Mexico.  She began acting at the age fourteen, playing Juliet in a Nairobi production of Romeo and Juliet.  Before she broke into movies, though, she was a production assistant in films like The Constant Gardener and The Namesake, and she wrote, produced and directed In My Genes, a documentary about how a a white person in a predominantly black society.

Following 12 Years a Slave, Lupita Nyong'o went on to star as Gwen Lloyd in the Liam Neeson airplane action thriller Non-Stop.

Actress Melinda McGraw

Melinda McGraw is an actress who has done a lot of TV work and some movie work as well.

Her best-known TV roles are police detective Cyd Madison in "The Commish" and as Dana Scully's sister in a few episodes of "The X-Files."  She also had a leading role in "The Pursuit of Happiness," a sitcom about an idealistic lawyer going through a mid-life crisis early in life while having to deal with his unemployed wife. It was not a hit.

More recently, after long since having played a police detective working under a commissioner, she played the wife of a police commissioner - Commissioner Gordon's wife in the Batman movie The Dark Knight.

Fun fact: Although Melinda McGraw calls Massachusetts her home state, she was in fact born in Cyprus, where her American parents were at the time.