What About Paris?

May 17, 2013

Pantheon: Rosamund Pike.

This British classically-trained stage actress attended Oxford. There she read English Literature at Wadham College, and graduated with a 2:1 degree. But more importantly, she's a plugger, is likely (while slumming in films) to win an Oscar some day, is 5'8" and could make a deaf, dumb and blind guy hear, speak and see. Welcome to our Pantheon, Miss Pike.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:51 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2013

Heiresses: All are Beautiful.

All heiresses are beautiful. --John Dryden (1631-1700)

And often bright: Dylan Lauren, Duke '96.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2013

Pantheon: Grace Slick

Talk About A Work Ethic. A gifted woman with enough Moxie, Passion and Talent to make up for about 1000 of the rest of us. A real life lived. And that voice. She put Finch College on the map. She's 73 now. Add Ms. Slick to our Pantheon.

Posted by JD Hull at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2013

Pantheon: Juliette Binoche. "You don't need money with a face like that."

You don't need the money with a face like that. Born in Paris, she's about to turn 49. She is the daughter of Jean-Marie Binoche, a director and sculptor, and Monique Stalens, a director and actress. She won an Oscar at age 32 for The English Patient but was only 23 when she starred in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. After seeing it, and her performance, one famous Yank critic wrote that she was "almost ethereal in her beauty and innocence." Welcome, ma'am, to our Pantheon.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2013

My Marrakesh plays Kabul: The Taliban, Fresh Starts and the Song of Winter Festival.

At the peripatetic and always-way fine My Marrakesh, do visit our gifted and versatile friend Maryam Montague. See her "Kabul, Afghanistan: and a tale of the Taliban & the Winter Festival." The exotic Yank expat Ms. Montague--she can heal the sick, raise the dead and make blind Anglo-Irish guys see again--is in motion again these days. We never miss her travels, posts or high arts.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)

November 09, 2012

Parker Posey: "You don't need the money with a face like that."

In The House of Yes

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2012

Heiresses: And Talented, Too.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Louis-Dreyfus Group, France.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2012

Pantheon: Catherine Deneuve. Smart, entrepreneurial, ageless.

Gallic elegance. Catherine Deneuve is as strong, resilient and talented as she is beautiful. She is likely the only woman in the world who could have made director François Truffaut completely and hopelessly lose it. She is smart, entrepreneurial and ageless. Add her to our Roman Pantheon.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2012

Soulful in America.

You may have dramatic cheekbones, pouty lips, Chiclet-white teeth, the neck of a gazelle, four feet of legs, a French manicure, and a serious rack of mamm. But if your insides aren't pretty, your outsides don't really mean that much...and there's no time like the present to go in for soul surgery.

--Andrew Creighton Stone, Editor-in-Chief, Los Angeles Confidential

American actress Katharine Ross: Beauty, brains, heart, soul.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2012

Pantheon: Charlotte Rampling. Still smoldering after thirty years in three languages.

Great gifts, persistence and drive are hard to beat. If you don't know who Charlotte Rampling, do find out. Ah, Charlotte. You made up for many of the rest of us. You started with much--so you worked even harder. Into The Pantheon, Enduring One. "Still smoldering" after thirty plus years in three languages. Even Paul Newman was blown away. We're not worthy. Please stick around and help for another thirty years.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2012

Pantheon: Vanessa Anne Hudgens. Charisma, legs and talents beyond her years.

Born December 14, 1988. American actress, singer. We were very, very wrong about her. She's not too young for The Pantheon. She got legs, legs, charisma and talent. She can act. We salute her--and stand corrected.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2011

Pantheon: Elizabeth McGovern.

Her dad was a Northwestern law prof. Born in Chicago 50 years ago, she has malleable ageless looks, and now lives in London. She played teenagers and 65-year-olds at 24 in Dan Hull's favorite movie, "Once Upon a Time in America". "America" is a long and critically controversial 1984 film about three stages in the lives of Jewish Manhattan hoods. We do forgive Ms. McGovern for dropping out of Juilliard to work on Robert Redford's first directing project. Add this uncannily eternal Total Betty to our Pantheon.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2011

To Renaissance Girl, Final Muse & Total Betty: They don't know what Love Is.

Also helps to be smart, patrician, well-educated, well-traveled, handsome, driven, resilient, optimistic, athletic, happy, way fun, charismatic, clean, sober, hopeful and hopelessly charming Yank from a family that's been in the colonies for 380 years. To a Renaissance Woman, Seer and Total Betty: They don't know what Love is.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2011

Pantheon: Lena Calhoun Horne.

1941 photo by Carl Van Vechten

Lena Horne died last year on May 9, 2010. She had natural class and confidence. She lived her life as a work of art. She could sing, dance, act. She could, and did, stand up to talentless arrogance, straight-up bullies and inelegance in all its forms--both before and after she became powerful in her own right. If you're of the greatest generation, you think of her as glamorous. If you're a Boomer, she's the best of the Civil Rights movement.

And if you were born after 1970, you might be curious about a New Yorker who begins life in a rapidly-changing Bedford–Stuyvesant, moves South without parents, heads back up to Brooklyn, becomes a Cotton Club mainstay at 17, breaks records in more than walk of life, and lives to be 92. Start here, here or here.

Add Ms. Horne to our Pantheon.

Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2011

Pantheon: Sigourney Weaver.

I need a woman about twice my height.
Statuesque.
Raven-tressed.
A goddess of the night.

--John Barlow and Bob Wier, "I Need a Miracle"

Patrician. Five foot eleven. Stanford and Yale. And she's freaking 61 years old. A Miracle.

Susan Alexandra Weaver in 2008

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2011

Pantheon: Ms. Posey

Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.

--Parker Posey

Ms. Posey is beyond Hip. Her own world. Like Neal Cassady, François Villon, Raoul Duke or GeekLawyer, if you have to look her up, you won't get it once you do. It's a relationship with a public talent that takes time. In late 2007, WAC/P? met and spoke to her briefly in the Newark Airport when he was on the way to Europe, and she was headed to New Mexico to work. She's the rare woman with Southern roots who won't skip along the surface. And not just funny. Her natural quirk and smarts nearly hide how gorgeous she is.

Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2011

Heroes: Parker Posey

Got sand? Parker does. Rent "Party Girl" (1995). Watch her dance at the end. She's among the first in our Pantheon, a really exclusive club. Not one where old guys in second tier cities pay dues to drool on their shirts. Parker, it is said, likes Non-Risk Averse People Who Step Up. That's not you, is it, Wendell? Time to get off your knees, maybe?

Pretty Bohemian Girl Next Door.

Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)