Lockdown Ladies from my Facebook posts. Week One.

As we are locked down, and because the Old Bat showed symptoms of the Chinese Virus, I hadn't been out of the house for three weeks. To cheer myself up, therefore, I have been featuring a photograph of an actress from the past on my Facebook page every day. Facebook being an organisation run by puritan Americans I am constrained as to the type of photograph I can show but not here. So I shall be posting some slightly more revealing shots of some of the ladies on this blog. Also, in some cases, I could not choose which image to use so here can post some of the alternatives.

We begin with our first seven days.

Day 1 Agnès Laurent

Agnès Laurent, was best known for her appearance in the amusing school-set comedy film A French Mistress (1960).

Born Josette Chouleur in Lyon in 1936, the types of parts she played in her short career can be determined by the titles of some of her films: Mannequins of Paris (1956), The Twilight Girls (1957), Mademoiselle Strip Tease (1957) and Soft Skin on Black Silk (1959.

Following her appearance in Mademoiselle Strip Tease she was featured in a pictorial in the July 1958's Playboy, as part of their ongoing uncoverage of continental actresses at the time.

Délicieuse!

Day 2 Alexandra Bastedo

For Day 2 we had elegant British actress Alexandra Bastedo, best known for her role in The Champions TV series in the late sixties

Born in Hove, in Sussex, in 1946, she attended Brighton School of Drama and her first film appearance was in 1963. Her final screen appearance was in EastEnders. perhaps surprisingly, in 2009. She was multi-lingual in five languages and even worked as a translator for Number Ten Downing Street.

Here she is in her 1970 Pirelli Calendar appearance photographed by Francis Giacobetti on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

After liaisons with men such as David Frost and Omar Sharif she married the poet, writer and director Patrick Garland who was artistic of the Chichester Festival Theatre.

Gorgeous!


Day 3 Anouska Hempel

Better known these days as one of the world's most famous interior designers, Anouska Hempel was born an a ship travelling between Papua New Guinea and New Zealand in 1946.  Brought up in New Zealand and Australia she moved to the UK when she was sixteen and got her first film part in Hammer's The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) the following year.

Here she is as one of the international Bond girls in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (196(). She was also in Department S, UFO, Space 1999, The Persuaders and Carry on at your Convenience (1971).

Here she is still looking superb in the nineties!

Timeless!


Day 4 Catherine Schell

The aristocratic, Hungarian actress Catherine Schell was born Katherina Freiin Schell von Bauschlot  She is known these days for appearing in Space 1999 (above).

Older wargamers will remember her enhancing Callan (1974) (above) and there were pictures of her holding some wargames figures in Military Modelling magazine at the time.

She was also one of the group of international Bond girls in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), along with Anouska Hempel (above). I also remember her luminously portraying explorer Florence Baker in the BBC's Search for the Nile (1971).

The Legatus does enjoy a fur bikini clad jungle girl so I particularly appreciated her in her first film, the West German Lana - Königin der Amazonen (1964) in which she played the title role. 

Gyönyörû! 



Day 5 Anne Francis

The producers of Forbidden Planet (1956) made the most of American actress Anne Francis' world class legs, giving her the shortest skirts seen in cinema to that point, a decade before the mini skirt.

Although Forbidden Planet was her best known film she had a long career, having her Broadway debut at the age of eleven in 1941 and her final TV appearance in 2004.

For most of the sixties, seventies and eighties she was kept busy with many guest star roles in popular TV shows such as Colombo, The Virginian, The Twighlight Zone, Kung Fu, Dallas, The Invaders and Burke's Law. Her role in the latter earned her a starring role in Honey West, the first eponymous female detective TV show.

Leggy!


Day 6 Beth Rogan

Rank starlet Beth Rogan is most famous for her doeskin ensemble (pictured) in one of my favourite Ray Harryhausen films, Mysterious Island (1961).  This was made at Shepperton Studios, about a mile from where I lived when I was younger and, indeed, Shepperton village square stood in for Richmond, Virginia in the film.

Here she is on location at Sa Conca beach near Girona, Spain which also appeared in other Harryhausen films The 3 World's of Gulliver's (1960) and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958).

I met her once, at an exhibition of her paintings (she attended Wimbledon Art School) in the Sussex village. Emsworth, where she lived. I only found out who she was when I went back home and looked up her name (Jeni Cassell, at that time) on the internet.

Artistic!


Day 7 Caroline Munro

Our Harryhausen theme continued and our first seven days of Lockdown Lovelies (thanks for the term, Sophie!) ended with English actress, and genre geek goddess, Caroline Munro in my favourite still of her from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973).

I have already covered Miss Munro extensively on Legatus' Wargames Ladies here.

Now, I counted the number of likes each lady got and the clear winner was Caroline Munro with thirteen. Second was Alexandra Bastedo with 11 and joint fourth were Agnès Laurent and Anouska Hempel with ten each!

The nest seven soon!

Playmates in Space: the girls of Apollo 12

Pete Conrad on the Moon November 19th 1969

It is fifty years ago today that astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean became the third and fourth men to walk on the Moon. The entire crew of three had a US Navy background but their backup crew, David Scott, Alfred Worden and James Irwin, were all US Air Force (they would later form the Apollo 16 crew). As a typical inter-service prank the back-up crew managed to insert photocopies of pictures of Playboy Playmates into the astronauts’ lunar checklist (see ringed, above), which the back-up crew had to prepare for the mission astronauts. These were a schedule of tasks to be performed on the moonwalks in a three and half inch by three and a half inch ring-bound booklet which were attached to the left wrists of their spacesuits. The astronauts didn’t discover the inserted pictures until actually on the moonwalks, as the check lists were not used in training. Each astronaut had two pictures inserted into their checklists.

Conrad: Angela Dorian

Pete Conrad’s contained, firstly, a picture of Angela Dorian, Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967. The caption to the picture in the checklist read ‘Seen any interesting hills & valleys?’ 

Angela Dorian: original photo

Angela Dorian was born Victoria Vettri in New York to Italian immigrant parents. She was already an actress on TV and film, including Yul Brynner Mayan epic Kings of the Sun (1963), when she posed for Playboy, at the age of twenty-two. She lost out on the lead role in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). She followed up her 1967 appearance in Playboy by becoming the Playmate of the Year for 1968.

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Best known for her subsequent roles in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and, especially, the Hammer prehistoric adventure When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), her career petered out in the early seventies; her last film being the far from epic Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

In court in 2011

 In 2011, after having shot her husband in the back at close range (he survived), during an argument, she was charged with attempted voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to nine years in prison. She was  released last year.

Conrad: Reagan Wilson

The second Playmate in Conrad's check list was Reagan Wilson, Miss October 1967, captioned ‘Preferred tether partner’; referring to a procedure for shared life support in an emergency. 

Reagan Wilson: original photo 

Californian Wilson was twenty when she posed for Playboy and had also done a little bit of TV acting. She made two films in the early seventies, both heavily featuring her 40 inch bust, before getting married and opening an antique shop with her husband.

Alan Bean’s first checklist picture was Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968, with a caption ‘Don’t forget – describe the protuberances’.

Myers was from Ohio, had just graduated from high school and was still only seventeen when she posed for Playboy.  Like all the images used for the checklists the picture came from the 1970 Playboy calendar which had just gone on sale.  Paid $5,000 for her shoot she was voted the 10th greatest Playmate of all time in 2000. For two reasons.

Cynthia's distinctive silhouette in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

She had an uncredited role as a native girl in the Hammer film The Lost Continent (1968) but her biggest role came in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) alongside another Playboy Playmate, Dolly Read. She died from lung cancer in 2011 at the age of sixty-one.

Bean: Leslie Bianchini

Bean's second checklist Playmate was Leslie Bianchini, Miss January 1969, with a caption of  ‘Survey-her activity’ a pun on the Surveyor 3 unmanned lander, which the mission was due to inspect on the surface of the Moon.

Leslie Bianchini: original photo

Leslie Bianchini was the daughter of an Illinois turkey farmer but the family moved to San Francisco and Playboy magazine found her conveniently working as a Bunny girl at the Playboy Club in that city. Twenty-one when her pictorial was shot she was a keen horsewoman and she later became a breeder of Arabian horses.

Gordon: DeDeLind

Dick Gordon, orbiting the Moon in the command module was not left out, either, and had the November 1969 page (in colour rather than a small photocopy) of that year’s Playboy calendar (rather than a picture from the 1970 edition as Conrad and Bean had) in his locker (above), which he discovered while the others were on the Moon. His Playmate was DeDe Lind who posed in August 1967, at the age of twenty. Miss Lind was so mature for her age that she was spotted by a photographer at a Californian swimming pool at the age of fourteen and started her modelling career then. Her Playboy centrefold received more fan mail than any other in the magazine’s history. Nearly thirty years after her centrefold she posed naked again for Playboy at the age of forty nine. In 2011 Dick Gordon sold the Calendar page at auction for $21,000.

In the image at the top of the page you can just make out the checklist on Pete Conrad's left arm displaying the picture of Reagan Wilson.

Jill St John for Playmen: March 1968

March 1968's issue of Playmen featured a specially shot pictorial of Jill St John by 'Pierluigi' photographed in the home she shared with recent, third husband, the singer, Jack Jones.  She was still only 27 at the time and it would be another three years before her slightly annoying but visually impressive appearance in Diamonds are Forever (1971)

Born Jill Oppenheim, she started acting on radio at six and made her screen debut at nine.  She ws put under contract bu Universal at the age of sixteen.  Making her name in a string of comedies in the sixties, after a series of earlier 'pretty girl' type roles, she had been nominated for a Golden Globe for Come blow your horn (1963), appearing with Frank Sinatra,

St John's fourth marriage was to Robert Wagner and when they met he was starring in TV detective show Hart to Hart with Stefanie Powers, with whom St John had been in the same Ballet Company as a child, along with Natalie Wood, Wagner's late wife.

These are quite revealing shots for an American actress at the time but photographer Pierluigi was one of the top cinema stills photographer of the time and a friend of Frank Sinatra with whom St John had just appeared again. in Tony Rome (1967).   Pierluigi Praturlon (1924-1999), to give him his full name (which he never used professionally), after starting as a photo journalist (a shot he took of the reclusive Greta Garbo in Rome in 1947 made his name), began shooting on film sets in Rome in 1949 capturing the glory days of Italian cinema after World War 2.

By the period these pictures were taken, he was considered one of the best stills photographers in the world. It was a shot he took of Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in 1958 that inspired Federico Fellini to recreate the scene in La Dolce Vita (1960).  He captured all the top stars from not only Italy but also Hollywood and Sofia Loren made him her personal photographer.

A year later, another Italian magazine, Kent, published some more shots from the shoot by Pierluigi and being a completist I felt compelled to include them here.

Here are a few more outtakes as well. What a very splendid young woman she was.  Pierluigi had a reputation for making his sitters feel at ease and catching them in a relaxed manner, He certainly caught St John looking very relaxed and informal in his characteristic reportage style.