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!

Marika Green for Playmen, December 1967

Much to my surprise my recent Wargames Ladies from Italian magazine Playmen have been very popular so I will feature a few more over the next month or so as my particular friend Angela enjoys their retro sixties style.

So here, from Playmen's December 1967 issue, photographed by Giancarlo Botti, we have actress Marika Green, Born in Stockholm in 1943 her father was Swedish and her mother French. 

Her first film role was at the age of 16 in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). She worked consistently in, mainly French, films and TV from then until the early nineties but her best known role was as one of the three leads in the notorious Emmanuelle (1974).

Oh, and she is Eva Green's aunt!

Easter Hatch by Georges Pavis

This illustration appeared in saucy French magazine La Vie Parisienne in 1926.  It was the work of Georges Pavis (1886-1977) who sold his first illustrations at the age of nine.  He studied at l'École des beaux-arts but was drafted into the army during the Great War, where he was badly injured at Verdun.  After the war he provided illustrations for all the main French magazines, as well as books.

Early Morning: Yvonne Aubicque by Sir William Orpen

Early Morning (1922)

This is an affectionate portrait of Yvonne Aubicque, the mistress of its painter, Irish artist Sir William Orpen (1878-1931), who has several fascinating stories connected to her.   Called, Early Morning it is a wonderful evocation of the pleasures of a mistress, as she sits surrounded by domestic detritus that indicates no great desire to leave her bed anytime soon.

William Orpen

William Orpen was born in Dublin and attended the Metropolitan School of Art there, to which he was admitted at the age of eleven, such was his natural skill. At the age of seventeen he moved to London to attend the  Slade School of Art.   Catching the attention of John Singer Sargent he rapidly became one of the country's top portrait painters.  Although he married and had three children he had a string of mistresses, many of whom modelled for him, despite constant worries about his own unattractiveness (caused, it is said, by overhearing his parents asking themselves why he was so ugly and their other children so attractive!).  

The Spy/ The Refugee I (1918)

In 1916 Orpen was appointed as an official war artist and carried on in this role after the war, where he was was the official painter of the Versailles treaty signing.  While in France, he fell head over heels for Yvonne Aubicque, the daughter of the Mayor of Lille, who he mat met in hospital, when suffering with blood poisoning, where she was working as a Red Cross volunteer.  He painted two portraits of her during the war but when he sent the paintings back to Britain he found himself in hot water, as official war artists were only supposed to paint pictures of military subjects. 

The Spy/The Refugee II (1917)

Even worse, he had called his pictures of her "The Spy" and claimed she was a German spy who had been executed by the French, no doubt in order to give it an acceptable "military" provenance.  However, the subject of female spies was sensitive at this period as English nurse Edith Cavell had been shot by the Germans for helping allied soldiers to escape and Mata Hari had also just been executed by the French.  Orpen found himself facing a court martial and had to confess that the paintings were of his mistress. One of Orpen's friends was Lord Beaverbrook, who was instrumental in preventing the court martial, although Orpen was severely reprimanded and only just hung on to his official war artist role.  Orpen changed the name of the pictures to The Refugee and, like his war paintings, they now belong to the Imperial War Museum in London.

The Beaverbrooke copy on the Antiques Roadshow

There is an interesting coda to this story.  In 2013 a man brought a picture along to the filming of the BBC show Antiques Roadshow, where members of the public bring along items and a panel of experts tell them about them.  It was a copy of Orpen's The Refugee I.  The owner had taken it to the Imperial War Musem who had said it was just a standard copy. He was not convinced, however, and was puzzled by the high quality of the picture and the fact it was signed Nepro Mailliw (William Orpen written backwards).  He discovered that in 1920 Orpen had gone back to France and painted another version of the painting for Lord Beaverbrook as a thank you for helping him escape the court martial.  The expert on the show confirmed that the picture was indeed a copy but was made by Orpen himself and was the long lost Beaverbrook version.  Much to the owner's shock, he valued it at £250,000.

Yvonne Aubicque in 1918

What happened to the lovely Yvonne?  She remained as Orpen's mistress for more than ten years; although he usually ran more than one mistress simultaneously.  When in France, after the war, he had bought a black Rolls-Royce and hired a sixteen year old called William Grover as his chauffeur.  Grover was the son of an English father and a French mother but had been born in France. He immediately took a fancy to Yvonne and she him.  You might expect all sorts of problems to follow but when Yvonne stopped being Orpen's mistress he gave her his Rolls-Royce and a large house in Paris.  Grover and Yvonne married in 1929.  Grover had always been keen on cars and motorcycles and had started to race motorcycles at the age of fifteen.  Worried about what his father might think, he used the pseudonym W Williams when he started to race. By 1926 he had graduated to car racing.  In 1928 he won the French Grand Prix and in 1929, in a British Racing Green Bugatti, he won the inaugural Monaco Grand Prix.  Now known as Grover-Williams he retired from racing to concentrate on business, including working for Bugatti and running a kennel where Yvonne bred Highland Terriers which she successfully showed at Crufts dog show, eventually becoming a judge there. They were a wealthy couple and, apparently, good dancers, winning several competitions.

Grover Williams leading the 1929 Monaco Grand Prix

With the German invasion of France Grover-Williams fled to Britain where, because of his fluency in both French and English, he was recruited into the Special Operations Executive where he was trained at their wartime base, the home of Lord Montague, Beaulieu in Hampshire, now, coincidentally, the site of the National Motor Museum.  Grover-Williams was dropped into France, with no contacts or support on the ground, and was instructed to set up a new resistance network in Paris, as the previous one had been compromised. Yvonne moved back to Paris as well, although she lived in their house in Rue Weber while he lived in a separate apartment.  He recruited two former fellow racing drivers and they began sabotage work, principally at the Citroen factory.  In August 1943 Grover-Williams was captured by the Germans as their network had been compromised and it was believed that he was interrogated by the Gestapo and shot almost immediately.

Reclining Woman.  Yvonne Aubicque by William Orpen

However, in the 1990's a different story emerged.  It looked as if Grover-Williams survived and was taken to a prison camp in Poland.  It then appears that he joined MI6 after the war.  Even more strangely, in 1948 a man called George Tambal turned up at Yvonne's house in Evreux and moved in with her. She introduced him as her cousin but the locals thought they acted more like lovers.  He claimed to have arrived from America via Uganda, bringing animals for the depleted zoos of Europe. Grover-Williams, it should be noted, had family in America and a sister in Uganda. Also, amazingly, Tambal's date of birth was exactly the same as Grover-Willams'. Tambal was very knowledgeable about motor cars and bore the scars of a beating around the head. 

No-one has ever proved it conclusively but it looks like Grover-Williams survived the war, joined MI6 (MI6 have admitted they know what happened to Grover-Willams but they won't say what) and then rejoined his wife in Evreux.  She died in 1973 and Tambal/Grover-Williams was killed in 1983, at the age of eighty, having been knocked off his bicycle by a car, ironically, driven by a German tourist.

Elements of this remarkable story were used by Robert Ryan in his novel Early One Morning in which a fictionalised version of Yvonne Aubicque appears as Eve Aubique.

Sir William Orpen died in Kensington in 1931, possibly from complications arising from syphilis, and at the time was probably the most famous artist in Britain.

Agnès Laurent

Agnès Laurent (1936-2010) was a lovely French actress who I remember as appearing in the title character in the British comedy A French Mistress (1960), which I saw at an impressionable age.

A French Mistress

Laurent made mostly French language films and by the time of her memorable turn in A French Mistress was getting towards the end of her short career.

After A French Mistress, she appeared in Mary had a little... (1961) regarded as the first British sex comedy, although, of course it had no sex and very little comedy.

After one more film, in 1961, her short five year film career was over. 

Un amour de Poche 

At the time, Playboy magazine liked to try and spot up and coming continental actresses and they featured her in their July 1958 issue.  She had just appeared in the film  Un Amour de Poche (1957), about a scientist who accidentally shrinks his lab assistant (Laurent) to the size of a small doll.

To save on special effects once shrunk Laurent remains inert, like a doll and is played mostly by...a doll.  At the end of the film the scientist's jealous fiancee throws shrunken/doll Laurent into the sea where the water and salt reconstitutes her into her full sized form once more. 

In these, for the time, rather racy publicity shots Laurent gambols in the sea with the actor who plays the scientist and the doll who plays her.

 Perky!

Splendide!