The Beauty of Retrospect, Anniversary Edition: Fanny Ardant

I promised a picture of the first woman I ever featured on this blog, four years ago. I'm not going to show you a picture of that woman, French actress Fanny Ardant.

I'm going to show you two! :-D

As noted in my original post, Fanny Ardant was discovered by the great movie director Francois Truffaut and was in his last two movies. She's gone on to become a major star in France; her films include Next Summer, Colonel Chabert, and Ridicule, among so many others. Her more recent movies include 8 Women, where she joined actresses such as Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart in what amounted to to the French equivalent of an all-star cast.

She also appeared in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina in 1995, and she has done other English-language movies as well. Other Fanny Ardant movies include the trilingual Callas Forever, in which she played opera star Maria Callas.

The Latest Numbers

As of today, I have posted pictures of 390 different women on my blog.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the day I started this blog. It started almost by accident; I had been contributing to a "beautiful women" picture thread on a message board, and I accumulated plenty of pictures I didn't know what else to do with. As I already had a blog on the Internet, I thought, why not post these pics on a blog of their own? The rest, as they say, is history. The total of 390 women so far translates to an average of 97.5 women per year, for those interested in statistics.

Tomorrow, I'll post a picture of the very first woman I featured here - and it's not Karen Graham. :-) You can see who it is just by going to the September 2006 archives page. Tune in tomorrow! :-)

The Beauty of Anonymity: Unidentified Erno Laszlo Model

This photograph is from an ad from the late 1970s for the Erno Laszlo beauty product company. I think the model featured is one of the most stunningly beautiful women I've ever seen.

The only problem is, I have no idea who she is. :-O

I've asked around on the Internet, and I've been told whom it might be, but no one seems to know. So while it might be one model or another, I can't really identify her for sure.

If anyone knows the name of this model, please leave a comment on this post. Any help is greatly appreciated. :-)

Actress Natalie Zea

Natalie Zea is a well-known face to regular viewers of American television.

Her best known roles are as Gwen Hotchkiss on the NBC daytime serial "Passions" and as Karen Darling on the ABC series "Dirty Sexy Money."

Actress Sela Ward

Sela Ward has been a fixture of television and movies for several years, and she is best known for two TV roles from the nineties - as Teddy Reed on the drama series "Sisters" (where every sister had a cutesy-pie masculine nickname - Teddy, Frankie, et al.) and as Lily Manning in another drama, "Once and Again," about an ongoing romance between two single parents.

The Mississippi-born actress - whose name is in fact an anagram of "seal draw" :-D - was, as of July 2010, slated to a appear as a regular on "CSI:NY."

Her feature movie credits inclide Nothing in Common, The Fugitive and 54. She also played the ill-fated TV newswoman Jessica Savitch in a TV movie.

Actress Lisa Vidal

Lisa Vidal has been a consistent presence in Hollywood for several years. While she has been in movies, she's mostly associated with television.

She played Dr. Sara Morales in the police/firefighter drama "Third Watch," and she now plays the First Lady of the United States, Christina Martinez, in a new thriller series on NBC titled "The Event," about a high-level coverup.

Actress Hunter Tylo

Hunter Tylo is an actress best known in the world of soap operas (oops, daytime dramas - I owe Miss Marshall a quarter! ;-) ), as she plays Taylor Hayes Forrester in the CBS show "The Bold and the Beautiful."

I don't know about her boldness, but she certainly has beauty. :-)

Tylo has done several TV spots endorsing several beauty products - of course - during her career.

Fun fact: One of Hunter Tylo's most memorable commercials was made just as her acting career was taking off. In an ad for DifRinse, a water-rinseable cold cream, she played a whiteface circus clown who removes her makeup with the product. The surprise is that you only realize she's a woman after she's also removed her bald-wig headpiece and let her hair down. (Well, that ad must have made a lot of young men want to run away and join the circus! ;-) )