Singer/actress Mandy Moore

Strictly speaking, Mandy Moore ought to be featured in one of my "Beauty of Song" series focusing on beautiful women in music.  But she's too enormously talented to be merely defined as a singer.

When the New Hampshire-born Ms. Moore first appeared as a fifteen-year-old pop singer at the close of the twentieth century, it was easy to dismiss her as yet another teen pop idol pushed by the suits who run show business to sell complacent entertainment to a generation of underthinking high school students.  But Ms. Moore had one thing that distinguished her from most other teen-pop divas - she could actually sing.

 

Maybe that's why her 1999 debut album was called So Real.

After  hit singles such as "Candy," I Wanna Be With You," and a cover of John Hiatt's "Have a Little Faith In Me" (can you imagine Britney Spears covering John Hiatt?), Ms. Moore became a movie star. While she'd had roles in movies like The Princess Diaries and the teen romance A Walk To Remember, she really showed her acting chops as Sally Kendoo in the hilarious 2006 black comedy American Dreamz, a satire of talent-contest TV shows.  This led to other meaty roles such as Molly Wilder in the 2007 mother-daughter flick Because I Said So, opposite Diane Keaton (an earlier honoree on this blog).   

Now she's scored big time in one of the biggest hits of her career - "This Is Us," a TV series following the lives of the Pearson family through the past and the present.  Ms. Moore plays Rebecca, the family matriarch - she's the mother of three children, including an adopted black child, and she has aspirations of becoming . . . a singer. :-)

As of this writing, "This Is Us" is a huge success on NBC, and it's about to begin its second season.  At a mere 33 years of age (again, as of this writing), Ms. Moore has assured herself a lasting place in American popular culture.

Mandy Moore was married to singer-songwriter Ryan Adams for seven years beginning in 2009. 

TV newswoman Karen Lee

If you watch a lot of local cable news in New Jersey, then you know about Karen Lee.

Until recently, she was the beat reporter for News 12 New Jersey's bureau in Bergen County, in New Jersey's northeastern corner, where she originally comes from. Now she's the cable news channel's weekend anchor.

Karen Lee worked in broadcast news as a reporter for WFSB-TV, the CBS affiliate in Hartford, and she's also worked at TV news outlets in upstate New York.  

Fun fact:  She's also a certified scuba diver. :-)

British actress Lily James

Pictures of Lily!  (Sorry, couldn't resist . . . )

Lily James is a British actress known for highbrow projects and clever action movies.  She's best known to viewers of public television as Lady Rose MacClare in "Downton Abbey."  But she's also known for her star turn in the movie Baby Driver, as the girlfriend of a young man who drives getaway cars for bank robbers and relates a great deal to pop music.  Ms. James's character is a waitress that the young man falls in love with.

Other roles include Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet at London's Garrick Theatre and Countess Natasha Rostova in the 2016 BBC adaptation of Tolstoy's "War and Peace."

Oh yeah, she also played Cinderella in Disney's 2015 live-action version of that fairy tale.

Not yet thirty as of this writing, Lily James is definitely an actress with a brilliant future.  

Chanel Iman

With a name like that, she was destined to become a top model. :-)

Chanel Iman - her full name is Chanel Iman Robinson - has been modeling since she was twelve years old.  Fortunately, at the age of 26 as of this writing, she has made the transition into adulthood with flying colors.

Chanel Iman has appeared on the covers of numerous international editions of magazines such as Vogue, Allure, and Harper's Bazaar, and she has walked the runway for designers such as Burberry, Max Mara, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Stella McCartney, Tommy Hilfiger, Jason Wu, Dior, Michael Kors, Hermés, Louis Vuitton, Alexander McQueen, and Marc Jacobs.  This is only a partial list. :-)

She gets her exotic looks from her half-Korean, half-black mother. 

The Los Angeles-raised Ms. Iman has dabbled in acting, appearing in Dope, a coming-of-age movie with a black cast and set in southern California.  

Actress Meagan Holder

Another post about another rising star in Hollywood. :-)

Though Meagan Holder has been in a few movies, including an installment in the cheerleader movie franchise Bring It On and the Four Seasons biopic Jersey Boys (in which she played a jazz singer), Meagan Holder is best known as a television actress.

Her best known TV role is as Darby Conrad in "Make It or Break It," a comedy-drama series on ABC family about aspiring gymnasts.

Meagan Holder seems to have a knack for making people laugh and cry on the small screen.  She appeared in another comedy-drama, "Born Again Virgin," about dating and relationships, on the TV One channel, as a regular cast member (playing Kelly Bowers).  That series lasted two seasons. 

Musical actress Lana Gordon

Lana Gordon is a singer, and actress, a dancer, and all that jazz.

And while she's played many roles on the stage, she's best known for playing Velma Kelly in the Broadway revival of Chicago.

An alumna of New York City's Alvin Ailey School, Ms. Gordon was in several ensemble companies before her career took off.  Her first notable role was as Dionne in a European tour of Hair. 

Ms. Gordon debuted on Broadway in 1997 as an ensemble original cast member in The Lion King, in which she also played the role of Shenzi.  She also spent a decade performing abroad in productions of such musicals as Sister Act, West Side Story (as Anita, a role made famous by the great Rita Moreno), and Carmen Cubana, a retelling of the old Prosper Mérimée story in a Caribbean setting - our heroine played the title role.  She's also in demand as a solo vocalist in Europe.

And oh yes, this shouldn't surprise you, but Lana Gordon has also worked as a model in the U.S., both in print and television advertising.  And like the most beautiful of top models . . .

. . . she looks even more gorgeous without makeup. :-D

And all that jazz. :-)

Actress Claire Foy

Another Brit named Claire. :-)

Claire Foy is a British actress who has done a few movies and a lot of British television.  Americans may remember her roles in Jon Stewart's political drama Rosewater and in the Maggie Smith movie The Lady In the Van.

She's made more of a mark TV, playing Lady Persephone "Persie" Towyn in an early-2010s reboot of "Upstairs Downstairs" and she's also played some royal roles as well. She played Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII's second wife,  in the miniseries "Wolf Hall," a drama about the Tudor king and the rise of  Thomas Cromwell in Henry's court, and she currently plays the U.K.'s current monarch, Elizabeth II, in the series "The Crown," a fictionalized account of Her Majesty's life.  There's a lot of material in that, to be sure.   

Actress/singer Doris Day

The one and only. :-)

In the fifties and early sixties, a time when the movies were dominated by sex goddesses  - Marilyn Monroe, Diana Dors, Brigitte Bardot - the similarly alliteratively named Doris Day stood out for playing the good-girl-next-door type, most notably in her movies with Rock Hudson - Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, and Send Me No Flowers.

Even James Garner lost his heart to Doris Day.  They appeared together in The Thrill of It All, a comedy about a housewife who becomes an unlikely celebrity when she endorses a laundry soap in a TV commercial, and they also co-starred in Move Over, Darling, in which Garner played the husband of Doris's character, who's mistakenly believed to be dead after a plane crash they were both in . . . until it turns out she survived the plane crash and returns to her remarried husband. Both movies are from 1963.  (Move Over, Darling was a reworking of the unfinished Marilyn Monroe film Something's Got To Give.)     

Doris Day, of course, started out as a singer in the 1940s, recording such songs as "Sentimental Journey" and "The Whole World is Singing My Song." She was in fact as big a star on the Billboard charts then as, say, Taylor Swift (an earlier honoree on this blog) is in the twenty-first century.  Her singing talents led to the a movie career when her performance of "Embraceable You" got her a role in the 1948 movie Romance on the High Seas. She also appeared in musicals like 1955's Young At Heart with Frank Sinatra, and her signature song, "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)", was the song she sang in the 1956 James Stewart/Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much.  Musical ability was something she passed on to her son, Terry Melcher; he produced the Byrds' first two albums and also worked with the Beach Boys.  Melcher died of cancer in 2004. 

She became a TV star in the sixties and seventies with "The Doris Day Show," which ran for five seasons, and she returned to the album charts in Britain and America at the age of 89 in 2011 with My Heart, an album of contemporary tunes from folks like John Sebastian, Billy Preston, and the Beach Boys' Bruce Johnston.  There's even a duet with her son,  Most of this material was recorded years before.  The proceeds from My Heart went to her animal-welfare charity, the Doris Day Animal League.         

At 95 in 2017 (this picture was taken for her ninety-fifth birthday), Doris Day shows no signs of slowing down. :-) 

Actress Jenna Coleman

British actress Jenna Coleman is best known in the United States for the title role in "Victoria," an ongoing series about the life of Great Britain's legendary nineteenth-century queen.  At this writing the first season has just concluded, covering the first four years of Queen Victoria's long reign.

She's also known, though, for her role in the long-running sci-fi time-travel series "Doctor Who" (which has been on the air since 1963) as Clara Oswald, the traveling companion of the Eleventh Doctor.  She also played Jasmine Thomas in the British soap opera "Emmerdale," which debuted in 1972.  Jasmine was an investigative reporter who killed a police officer who tried to rape her, though she eventually broke down and confessed to the crime, leading to her being sent to prison.

So, playing a long-reigning queen comes naturally to Jenna Coleman, thanks to her experience in television programs that have run longer than she's been alive.  And I look forward to continuing to see her in a long run of "Victoria." :-) 

Model Barbara Brejwa

Barbara Brejwa is another model from the 1980s.

Like most models, she was based in New York.  She was represented by the Wilhelmina agency.

British model Claire Atkinson

The British Invasion of the 1960s wasn't just about popular music.  It was also an infusion of British movies, art, and yes, fashion into American culture.  British models were as celebrated as British rock stars and actors.  By contrast, however, a good deal of what came to America from Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the eighties, shall we say, left something to be desired, but the U.K.'s contributions to the modeling profession were still impeccable.  Claire Atkinson, one of the most active models of the 1980s, is proof of that.

  

Her smile and pose in the picture above are indicative of her beauty and of her charm.  And the 1991 photo below, showing her in a Sophie Hallette number, demonstrates how she can turn many a head with her poise.

Among the other fashion houses she's modeled for is Ungaro, as seen below.

And if beauty is fatal, she could be lethal in a strapless number with matching opera gloves! :-O

Mercy! 

Claire Atkinson's career took her to New York, London Paris . . . Munich?  I don't know about Munich, but she certainly worked in the other three cities, having been represented by Elite Model Management and Pauline's in New York, Models1 Elite in London, and by the Zen agency and by Pauline's' French offices in the City of Light. 

The Latest Numbers (And Other Things)

I have posted pictures of 1,080 different women on this blog, and I am on course to reach 1,100 by the end of this blog's eleventh year in late September 2017.  I won't bother to recap the ten most popular posts on this blog, as nothing has changed; the same posts occupy the same positions.  I believe my top-ten list has assumed permanent shape.

Also, I'd like to address, before anyone else does, an issue with my just-concluded fourth series of beautiful athletes, which was the fact that nine out of my ten subjects were white - the exception being Jackie Joyner-Kersee.  I wasn't trying to exclude women of color; I wasn't trying to exclude anyone.  I simply picked the first names that came to mind or the first female athletes I found online.  Bear in mind that female athletes, for the most part, aren't as famous as their male counterparts for obvious - and obviously misogynistic - reasons, so their names don't come to mind as quickly or as easily as Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, or Michael Strahan.  (See what I mean?  See how quickly I came up with three male athletes named Michael - only one of them a white guy?)   But I believe I've kept my blog very diverse in the nearly eleven years I've been doing this, so I don't apologize to anyone for lack of diversity.  In putting together my fourth "Beauty of Sport" series, though, I did drop the ball - pun intended - and I'll make an effort to do better next time.

Meanwhile, I have to acknowledge the death of Jeanne Moreau, who died yesterday (July 31) at 89.  I featured her here - four years to the day before her death, by a bizarre coincidence - and even though my July 31, 2013 post of Mlle. Moreau will remain, I will not of course post any more pictures of her going forward per my own my rule of not featuring women here after their deaths.

Back tomorrow with another A-Z series of new subjects - twenty women in total. :-)