Actress Helen Mirren

Is Helen Mirren, pictured below in the late 1960s, one of the greatest actresses of our time?

Yes, when you consider what a journeywoman actress she's been, having done cinematic versions of plays by Strindberg (Miss Julie, in the title role, in 1972) and Shakespeare (Hamlet, as Ophelia and Gertrude, in 1976), as well as movies that are little noted nor long remembered (the last Peter Sellers movie, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, and that less said about that, the better).  Her best years as an actress, however, have been later in life.

She's played both English queens named Elizabeth (in Elizabeth I and, as Elizabeth II, The Queen), and she reprised her portrayal of Britain's current monarch on stage for The Audience. In fact, many of her roles have been historical figures - she's played philosopher Ayn Rand in The Passion of Ayn Rand, she's played Austrian Jewish refugee Maria Altmann (who took on the Austrian government to reclaim priceless paintings owned by her family and stolen by the Nazis . . .and won) in Woman In Gold, and she appeared as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in Trumbo (about a blacklisted screenwriter).  But she's also done lighthearted movies, like Calendar Girls, about middle-aged women in Britain who make a calendar with nude photos of themselves for charity.  And much more.

Born Helen Mirinoff to an English mother and to a Russian father whose own father was a Russian diplomat caught in London after the czar was overthrown (her father had the family name anglicized), she began her career with the National Youth Theatre in 1965, which led to her joining the Royal Shakespeare Company a year later.  She would work with different theater companies and eventually appear on Broadway in the U.S., in addition to her film work.  Though she's done a lot of Shakespeare, her Russian heritage would come in handy, not just for Russian plays like Ivan Turgenev's A Month In the Country but for roles such as a Soviet cosmonaut in 2010, the 1984 sequel to 2001 (and who could have known in 1984 that there would be no Soviet Union in the twenty-first century?)    

Fun fact: Helen Mirren is married to film director Taylor Hackford.  You know An Officer and a Gentleman?  Chuck Berry: Hail Hail Rock and Roll?  Him.         

Actress Brie Larson

Brie Larson was the breakout movie star of 2015.

She starred in Room, a drama about Joy Newsome, a kidnapped woman who is kept in shed and bears a child fathered by her abductor.  Joy protects the boy psychologically by letting him believe that their situation is normal, even as she plots their escape.   

Ms. Larson had her first role at the age of ten, in the 1999 movie Special Delivery, and she had small roles in TV shows and in movies - including her role as Kim Townsend in Trainwreck - before Room, which got her the 2016 Best Actress Oscar. 

Television actress Erinn Hayes

Erinn Hayes is an actress who dabbled in broadcast television but has become a star on basic cable.

She played a chef on Fox's "Kitchen Confidential" and had a part on CBS's "Worst Week," but neither show was a success.  She hit the jackpot, though, as Dr. Lola Spratt on "Childrens Hospital," a series parodying medical dramas, starring and created by "Daily Show" alumnus Rob Corddry.  The show finished its seventh and final season on the Adult Swim channel in April 2016; it premiered on that channel in July 2010 after having originally aired on the Web for a couple of years.

Fun fact:  Erinn Hayes is in a Notting Hill-type marriage.  Her husband Jack is not in show business; he's a construction supervisor.  They have two daughters.

Canadian model/actress Shalom Harlow

Shalom Harlow is a model who has been active since she left high school.

The Canadian-born-and raised Ms. Harlow was discovered at a Toronto performance of the Cure, one of those bands you might associate with the sort of alternative values that don't go with haute couture. :-D  But that didn't matter, as Ms. Harlow turned out to have the perfect look. :-) 

How perfect?  Well, she's modeled for  Jones New York, Tiffany, Nautica, and Chloé, among others, and she co-hosted MTV's "House of Style" with another high-profile model, Amber Valletta.

She's also gotten into acting, having appeared in movies such as Vanilla Sky, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Melinda and Melinda.

Actress and singer Renée Elise Goldsberry

Renée Elise Goldsberry is currently the toast of Broadway for her work in Hamilton, the musical based on the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury.  It's a musical that uses hip-hop to tell Hamilton's life story, so if you're not into that sort of thing . . . well, there's still Renée Elise Goldsberry. :-D

She happened to win the 2015 Drama Desk Award and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical.  As of this writing, she's still in the cast of Hamilton; she plays the role of Angelica Schuyler Church, daughter of American Revolution general Philip Schuyler; she was Hamilton's wife's sister.

Ms. Goldsberry has also been a fixture on television, having played Evangeline Williamson on the soap opera "One Life To Live" for four years beginning in 2003.  She's also had small roles on "The Good Wife" and "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," but her main passions are theater and singing (she even played a singer om "Ally McBeal").   Her other Broadway roles include Nettie in The Color Purple and Nala in The Lion King.

Fun fact: Renée Elise Goldsberry is also a songwriter.  She composed more than half of the soundtrack for the 2001 romantic comedy movie All About You, including the title song, in addition to starring in that movie as Nicole.

TV newswoman Navideh Forghani

Navideh Forghani is a rpoerter for KNXV-TV in Phoenix.

Originally from Gainesville, Florida, Navideh Forghani grated from the University of Florida with a journalism degree and worked at the NBC affiliate in Augusta, Georgia as a reporter and as a weekend anchor.  She joined KNXV-TV, Phoenix's ABC station, in August 2011.

Specializing in multimedia, Ms.Forghani is most focused on investigative journalism, having uncovered a sex discrimination case in a local police department in the Augusta area.

She won several awards for her reporting work in Florida and Georgia and most likely looks forward to winning more of them in Arizona. :-)    

Model Kriss Evtikhieva

Kriss Evtikhieva is an up-and-coming model of the latest generation of cover girls.

She's represented by the Karins agency in Paris, and she's also been affiliated with the Option agency in Zurich. Biographical and professional data on her is scant, though she already has one big credit to her name . . . a beauty assignment with a more established model named . . . Catherine Roberts. 

Maybe you've heard of her! ;-) 

TV weatherwoman Ashley Dougherty

Ashley Dougherty is a familiar face in the Pittsburgh area, especially for those who watch the news on weekend mornings.  She does the weather forecasts on WTAE-TV on the morning reports every Saturday and Sunday.

She started meteorological career ar WTRF-TV in Wheeling, West Virginia in 2008 and eventually made it to Pittsburgh,  joining WTAE-TV, an ABC affiliate, in 2012.

According to the station's Web site, Ashley Dougherty enjoy playing golf and bocce.  She's also an animal welfare activist, and she helps to get cats and dogs adopted out of animal shelters. 

Model Anna Cleveland

Yes, she's Pat Cleveland's daughter. :-)

And, her father is Dutch photographer Paul Van Ravenstein, which means, if you've been paying attention to this blog recently, that top model Appolonia Van Ravenstein is her aunt.  So Anna Cleveland was destined to join the family business.

In fact, Anna Cleveland got into the modeling profession when she was four, appearing in a Moschino fashion show.  She and her brother even joined their mother in a Chanel show when Anna was only thirteen.

She's already accumulated a list of fashion shows to her credit that rivals the Dead Sea scrolls in length, and her editorial credits include assignments for Numéro magazine in France, the Italian edition of Vogue and the British and Spanish editions of Harper's Bazaar.

Fun fact:  Though her father is Dutch (she was born in the Netherlands) and her mother is American,  Anna Cleveland was raised in Stresa, Lago Maggiore, Italy, though her family moved to New Jersey was she was fifteen.  For the record, she turned 27 in March 2016.      

Her she is again, with her famous mother and fashion designer Stephen Burrows. :-) 

Model/actress Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer started out as a model in New York and quickly graduated to acting.

Originally from Australia, Ms. Bauer came to America in the 1970s and worked as a model for a time, doing ads for clients like Aziza cosmetics, and ad from which the photo above is taken.  By the end of the decade her acting career had started with a role in Winter Kills, a movie of political intrigue based on a Richard Condon novel. 

Her roles in the eighties included that of an alien woman living on Earth in Starcrossed, from 1985, Pat Lennon in 1987's The Rosary Murders,  and Dr. Juliette Faxx in the 1990 sequel to RoboCop (pictured below).  She also had supporting roles in movies like Flashdance and starred as the love interest of Jan-Michael Vincent in the pilot episode of the TV series Airwolf (but her character was killed off in the pilot). 

After the mid-nineties, Belinda Bauer retired from acting and became a psychologist.  She's based in Los Angeles. 

The Latest Numbers

I have now posted pictures of 961 different women on this blog.  And not only am I clearly going to make it to a thousand by the time this blog's tenth anniversary is marked this September, I'll have several more women to get to for the rest of 2016, as well as for 2017 and beyond.

This blog is going to be here for a long, long time.

Back with more new subjects soon.