Most Beautiful Women in History in Black and White Photos

1. Grace Kelly teases with just a hint of a smile

(12 November 1929–14 September 1982), Academy Award-winning American actress, fashion icon, and princess of Monaco.According to cosmetic surgeons, Grace Kelly is considered one of the most beautiful women in history because her face follows a mathematical equation called the golden ratio

2. Claudia Cardinale is one of the most famous Italian beauties of all times.

via: beautiful-women-pedia

3. Brigitte Bardot personifies the elegance of her era

Brigitte Bardot was born on September 28, 1934 in Paris, France. Arguably film’s first sex kitten, Brigitte Bardot grew up in a wealthy, conservative French Catholic family.  Her father had an engineering degree and worked with his father in the family business. She was named for her mother’s favorite doll. By the time she was 15, Brigitte was trying a modeling career, and found herself in the French magazine “Elle”. She moved from modeling to acting, and played a 17-year-old nymphet (at 22) in Vadim’s And God Created Woman, a role that made Bardot known internationally. She embodied a natural yet innocent sexuality that was a precursor to the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s.

4. Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes are just as enchanting without their violet hue

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (February 27, 1932-March 23, 2011) was born  in London, the daughter of two wealthy American art dealers, Francis and Sara Taylor. Her mother was a former actress who had given up the career when she married but encouraged her daughter in the pursuit. In 1944 Taylor’s film,  “National Velvet,” made her a star.

The Hollywood beauty was married eight times, to seven different men.

5. Sophia Loren

Born in Rome, 1934.  Raised in poverty. Won Academy Award. Regarded as one of the most beautiful women in history.

6. Ornella Muti

Ornella Muti was born on March 9, 1955 in Rome, Lazio, Italy as Francesca Romana Rivelli.

via: listal

7. Anna Karina

Anna Karina (born 22 September 1940) is a Danish-born French film actress who is best known for her work with Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s. With her expressive, luminous eyes and radiant presence she had the looks of a silent movie star while simultaneously embodying the self-confident spirit of the 60s generation.via: newwavefilm

9. Susan Peters combines girlish charm with ladylike elegance

She was born Suzanne Carnahan in Spokane, Washington on July 3, 1921.  Susan Peters possessed a creative talent and innate sensitivity that would surely have reigned as a leading Hollywood player for years to come had not a tragic and cruel twist of fate taken everything away from her. Married to the actor Richard Quine, she was with him on a hunting vacation in early 1945, when a rifle accidentally discharged, causing a bullet to be lodged in her spine. The accident left her permanently paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheel chair, however she attempted to continue her acting career. Her career faltered, and as her marriage ended, Peters suffered from depression. Her health continued to deteriorate until her death, aged 31, in Visalia, California, from kidney disease and pneumonia, complicated by anorexia nervosa

 

10. Jane Seymour would have made an excellent Rapunzel

Actress Jane Seymour was born on February 15, 1951, in Hayes, Hillingdon, England. At age 20, she was cast in the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

11. Natalie Wood effortlessly plays the part of the girl next door

The daughter of Russian immigrants, Natalie Wood was born on July 20, 1938, in San Francisco, California. At 16, she co-starred with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). In 1961, she played Maria in West Side Story and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in Splendor in the Grass. In 1981, Wood drowned during a boating trip with husband Robert Wagner and Brainstorm (1983) co-star Christopher Walken. The circumstances of her death remain controversial.

12. There is no question of why Marilyn Monroe earned her place in history

Actress Marilyn Monroe was born as Norma Jeane Mortensen on June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles, California. During her all-too-brief life, Marilyn Monroe overcame a difficult childhood (at 7 years old, Monroe returned to a life in foster homes, where she was on several occasions sexually assaulted; she later said that she had been raped when she was 11 years old) to become of the world’s biggest and most enduring sex symbols. She never knew her father, and once thought Clark Gable to be her father—a story repeated often enough for a version of it to gain some currency. However, there’s no evidence that Gable ever met or knew Monroe’s mother, Gladys, who developed psychiatric problems and was eventually placed in a mental institution.
During her career, Monroe’s films grossed more than $200 million. Monroe died of a drug overdose on August 5, 1962, at only 36 years old.

13. Anita Ekberg exudes strength, sex appeal, and sass

Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg was born on September 29, 1931 in Malmo, Sweden. Growing up with seven brothers and sisters was not an adventure, but Anita’s adventure began when she was elected Miss Sweden in 1950. She did not win the Miss Universe contest but she got a modeling contract in the United States. She quickly got a film contract with Howard Hughes’s RKO that did not lead anywhere (but Anita herself has said that Hughes wanted to marry her.) Instead, she started making movies with Universal, small roles that more often than not only required her to look beautiful.

After five years in Hollywood, she found herself in Rome, where Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) meant her breakthrough. She stayed in Italy and made around 20 movies during the next ten years, some roles memorable, some to be forgotten. Her two marriages gave her a lot of attention from the press. During the 1970s, the roles became less frequent, but she made a marvellous comeback with Fellini’s Intervista (1987).

Anita Ekberg retired from acting in 2002 after 50 years in the motion picture industry. (via: imdb)

14. Ava Gardner’s expression commands attention

Here’s another brunette beauty whose face could not have been drawn to be more symmetrical — Ava Gardner. Ignoring the scandal that followed her throughout life, when it comes to beauty, she has itAva Lavinia Gardner was born in Grabtown, North Carolina, on December 24, 1922. She was her parents’ seventh child. When Gardner was 2 years old, she and her family were forced to leave their tobacco farm. Her father then worked as a sharecropper, while her mother ran a boardinghouse. The family always struggled financially, a situation that worsened when Gardner’s father died when she was 16.
Gardner signed a contract to be an actress with MGM in 1941, but it wasn’t until her appearance in 1946’s The Killers that she became a star. Gardner’s off-screen life was often as dramatic as the roles she played, with marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra whom she considered the love of her life. Gardner died on January 25, 1990, at age 67, in London, England.

15. Lauren Bacall’s has the “come hither” eyes down to a science

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, to a middle-class family in the Bronx borough of New York City. Her father, William, was an alcoholic who left the family when Bacall was six; Bacall and her mother later changed their last name to her grandmother’s maiden name, Bacal, and added the second “l.” Lauren Bacall was a fashion mag cover model before landing her debut film role in To Have and Have Not, co-starring with Humphrey Bogart, whom she would marry. A decades-long career ensued with movies that include Key Largo, A Woman’s World, Murder on the Orient Express, The Fan, The Portrait and The Mirror Has Two Faces.

During her marriage to Bogart, Lauren Bacall starred in only one film per year. The pair co-starred in three more films (The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo), and had two children together, Stephen and Leslie. In 1957, Bogart died of lung cancer. Bacall was devastated. After a brief and disastrous fling with Frank Sinatra, including a very brief engagement, Bacall went east to return to her very first love, the theatre. She married again in 1961, this time to Jason Robards, Jr. The couple soon had a son named Sam. Bacall and Robards were divorced in 1969

16. Gene Tierney is flawless from head to pointed toe

Actress Gene Tierney was born into a wealthy family on November 20, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York. She appeared on Broadway in 1938 and transitioned to film in 1940, starring opposite Henry Fonda. She continued in films through the ‘40s and ‘50s. Her most famous role was in the 1944 movie Laura. Tierney was married to Oleg Cassini from 1941 to 1952; they have two daughters, Daria and Christina. She was married Texas oil baron Howard Lee from 1960 until his death in 1981. She struggled with depression in the later part of her life and died in 1991 from emphysema.

17. Leslie Caron nails the pinup look

Actress and dancer Leslie Claire Margaret Caron was born in  Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France on 1 July, 1931. Her mother was an American dancer on Broadway and her father a French Chemist. Caron was prepared for a performing career from childhood by her mother. She appeared in 45 films between 1951 and 2003. In 2006, her performance in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit won her an Emmy for guest actress in a drama series.

Caron is best known for the musical films An American in Paris (1951), Lili (1953), Daddy Long Legs (1955), Gigi (1958), and for the non-musical films Fanny (1961), The L-Shaped Room (1962), and Father Goose (1964).

18. Joan Bennet shows why cigarettes used to be considered sexy

19. Paulette Goddard looks ready to conquer the seven seas

 

20. Ingrid Bergman’s backward glance will make you do a double-take

21. Marlene Dietrich

Born: December 27, 1901 in Schöneberg, Berlin, Germany
Died: May 6, 1992 (age 90) in Paris, France

Her father was a police lieutenant and imbued in her a military attitude to life. Marlene was known in school for her “bedroom eyes” and her first affairs were at this stage in her life – a professor at the school was terminated. She entered the cabaret scene in 1920s Germany, first as a spectator then as a cabaret singer. In 1923, Dietrich married Rudolf Sieber, a film professional who helped her land a part in Tragedy of Love (1923). The couple welcomed their only child, Maria, the following year. They later separated, but never divorced.

She was in over a dozen silent films in increasingly important roles. In 1929, she was seen in a Berlin cabaret by Josef von Sternberg and, after a screen test, captured the role of the cabaret singer in Der blaue Engel (1930) (and became von Sternberg’s lover). With the success of this film, von Sternberg immediately took her to Hollywood, introducing her to the world in Maroko (1930), and signing an agreement to produce all her films. A series of successes followed, and Marlene became the highest paid actress of her time. Although the last 13 years of her life were spent in seclusion in her apartment in Paris, with the last 12 years in bed, she had withdrawn only from public life and maintained active telephone and correspondence contact with friends and associates.

via: imdb.

22. Vivien Leigh’s gaze is perfectly piercing

23. Mata Hari

Mata Hari  (1876-1917) was spy and an exotic dancer from the Netherlands who was accused, convicted and executed as a double agent during World War I.  Evidence of her actual guilt is frequently questioned.

via: philetchri

24. María Félix

…probably the most beautiful face in Mexican screen history

25. Capucine

Born in Saint Raphael, Var, France in 1928, Capucine was a prominent model and actress in the 60s. She was a featured model for Dior and Givenchy, as well as a co-star to Peter Sellers in the famous movie, ‘The Pink Panther’.

26. Maureen O Hara

The red-headed actress and singer O’Hara was born as Maureen FitzSimons in Churchtown, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland (17 August 1920) . Her father, Charles, was a businessman, and her mother, Marguerite, was an accomplished stage actress and opera singer.
Maureen trained in drama, music and dance from the age of 6-17 and in 1939, at the age of 19,  she signed a contract with RKO Studios. She moved to Hollywood in the summer of that year, making her American film debut as the alluring gypsy Esmeralda (opposite Laughton’s Quasimodo) in RKO’s lavish production The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

spouses: George H. Brown, (m. 1939–41; annulled), Will Price (m. 1941–53; divorced) she had a doughter with him,  Bronwyn FitzSimons Price (1944),  Charles F. Blair, Jr  (m. 1968–78; his death). Blair held the notable distinction of being the first pilot to make a solo flight over the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole. He died in a plane crash on September 2, 1978.

 

27. Barbara Brylska-the most beautiful Polish actress

Brylska  (June 5, 1941) was born in Poland and raised in poverty under the Nazi occupation of Poland during the Second World War. She began her career at the age of 15 and won the State Prize of the USSR in 1977. Because of her acceptance the state Prize of the USSR she experienced ostracism in her own country, Poland. Barbara Brylska had several marriages and had a daughter and a son. Her daughter died in a car accident at the age of 20 and Brylska suffered from a nervous breakdown, however she continued her acting career.

28. Yulia Borisova

Yulia Borisova, Russian actress (born 1925), Yevgeny Vakhtangov Academic Theatre, place the role of Nastasya Filipovna in the Idiot play.

via: top-antropos

via: biography, pinterest

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