Reply to Who do you think was beautiful in her prime: Vivien Leigh or Farrah Fawcett?

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Reply to "Who do you think was beautiful in her prime: Vivien Leigh or Farrah Fawcett?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Farrah had a square-ish face and large mouth.  If not for that hair, she wouldn't have had so many posters.  Jaclyn Smith was the classic beauty of Charlie's Angels.

Leigh was a classic beauty, too.[/quote]

I agree Smith was the more classically beautiful of the Charlie's Angels, but I think Fawcett's appeal was not just the hair but also her smile. If you look at photos of Fawcett where she isn't smiling, she looks only slightly above average in terms of beauty, but her smile is big and very natural and inviting. It made her seem approachable and inviting. That's why that poster of Fawcett was so iconic -- it's the way she's tossing her head back and smiling like you're in on the joke. She was a very good model even though Smith was the beauty queen.

I think it can be hard to evaluate the beauty of film stars from before the 1950s because that was when movies were more like stage plays, including a lot of artifice in styling actors. Like to me the classic Vivien Leigh image is her pursing her lips a bit and arching her eyebrows over her big eyes. But that appearance is pretty artificial -- those eyebrows are drawn on with a hyper-dramatic arch, her lips are drawn on to look like a rosebud, too. If you look at photos of her from before she was a star and where she has less makeup, she can look extraordinarily different and not like the image you have in your head.

Movie stars back then were kind of like the way you think of drag stars now. It was much more about artifice. It wasn't until the 50s that Hollywood started embracing a more natural look onscreen and the makeup/costuming really strongly diverged from stage work in terms of approach. And the movie stars also got more strikingly attractive (Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, the Hitchcock women) because their appearance was simply enhanced on screen -- their faces weren't being drawn on in the same way.[/quote]

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