Venus in Egypt: Lesley-Anne Down for Sphinx

Lesley-Anne Down was one of Triple P's favourite actresses of the seventies and early eighties.  In a previous post we admired her dressed in black stockings for the enjoyable film The First Great Train Robbery (1979) and in Upstairs, Downstairs.

Here, this time, we have her in a series of publicity photos taken in Egypt for the thriller Sphinx, for which she was the star at a time when female leads were still unusual in Hollywood.  It could have made her a major star but, unfortunately, despite being based on a popular novel by Robin Cook and good locations in Egypt it was a badly reviewed flop.  It essentially killed Lesley-Anne's film career dead and she had to concentrate on TV from then on.  There were a number of things wrong with it, not least a mis-cast Frank Langella and John Geilgud, and Down, who was so good in The First Great Train Robbery was terribly wooden in this.  She was also burdened with an unflattering haircut.  It's an OK film for a wet Sunday afternoon if you don't want to watch that other Egyptian archaeology film from that year, Raiders of the Lost Ark, again.

These publicity shots feature a costume, if you can call it that, which didn't, sadly, appear in the film.  They certainly were widely published in advance of the film's release, including in the December 1980 Playboy from the credits of which we can venture that they were shot by Michael Childers.

You have to give Down her due here as she looks sensational dressed, essentially, in two strips of very sheer fabric held together by a few bits of string.  She's not in a studio but actually out on location in Egypt where she would, no doubt, have been arrested if she had been caught dressed like this.  Full marks for nerve!

Pancake Day Venus: Melissa Debling

Today is Pancake Day so here is Melissa Debling from Ramsgate with a very large stack.  

The strange world of the weekly "lad's mag" in Britain is entirely inhabited by busty creatures such as Ramsgate-born Melissa.  Appropriately, it is a two way fight as market leader Nuts and younger pretender Zoo battle it out with under-dressed Page 3 girls, sport and bad humour.

The "lad" culture can be traced back to the early nineties where it was seen as an antithesis to the "new man" phenomenon espoused by the likes of Arena and GQ magazines.  Defiantly anti-feminist, its popularity is much attacked by nervous politicians and an odd alliance between the liberal and conservative press who are doing their best to turn Britain into a sexless, gender neutral, politically correct, dystopian nightmare (i.e: Canada).

Not long ago the Conservative Party were warning that “lads mags” were a bad thing, were corrupting the young fathers of this country and should be banned (or at least put on the top shelf of newsagents where, presumably, young fathers would not be able to reach them as their arms would be too tired from lugging around the baby, buggy and the bag loads of  paraphernalia that accompany the squealing creatures). 

The main crime magazines like Zoo and Nuts is that they cause men to treat women as sex objects, according to the huffy Daily Telegraph.  Good grief, women are sex objects! That is what they were designed to be and if they weren’t we would all die out faster than the dinosaurs after the meteorite hit. As soon as man first started to create art he started to make carvings of naked women. As soon as he started to paint he painted naked women (and mammoths which were, admittedly pretty impressive and worth recording). As soon as he found a way to record objects on paper using light and light sensitive chemicals (Agent Triple P thinks that the invention of photography was as close to actual magic as you could get, as Arthur C Clarke would no doubt have agreed) he started photographing naked women, especially as many of the early photographers were based in France and had better raw material to work with. As soon as he found a way to make pictures move he took movies of naked women. As soon as he found a way to digitise images and send them electronically he sent naked women. Is it a surprise that the standard image for testing image processing algorithms is knows as a “Lenna” or “Lena” and is a cropped image of the centrefold (Lena Soderberg) from Playboy’s November 1972 edition? Much of the technological advancement made in order to improve the performance of the internet was done so as to be able to move pictures and videos of naked women around the web as fast as possible.

This pernicious anti-sexual movement has now moved on from purporting to protect young fathers from temptation to protecting children, as the press happily alight on the recent disclosures regarding TV presenter and disc jockey Jimmy Saville as moral justification.  We are happy to defy this worrying development here on Venus Observations which has always celebrated women's beauty, difference and, dare we say, superiority.  Life in Britain for millions of people was always handicapped by a peculiar attitude to nudity and sex which does not exist, for example, in many (most?) of the countries in Continental Europe.  What none of the newspapers have addressed, not surprisingly, is whether the mental health of girls in these countries is as shattered as it is supposedly in Britain by their current hates of sexualised music videos, online pornography and depictions of naked women.  Why is it that Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe?  Perhaps it is something to do with the long standing and now returning attitudes that sex and nudity (which are not the same thing) are bad, dirty and, therefore, become illicit.

Bond Girl Venus 3: Rachel Grant - Die Another Day

From FHM Philippines

Today's Bond girl was one of those stunning bit-part players but was rather more than just background dressing. We were just flicking through the TV channels this afternoon to check out our newly installed fibre-optic cable TV when what should we come across but Children's TV Science show Braniac, which largely focussed on experiments such as how quickly would a microwave or caravan explode if you put inappropriate things in it. 

Very much the two best things in Brainiac was "Professor Myang Li" whose job was to demonstrate the answers to critically important questions such as "Which fruit floats?"

In reality Myang Li was British/Filippina actress Rachel Grant.  Miss Grant is a far more interesting person than her (admittedly enjoyable) bimbo role in Brainiac might suggest.

Rachel was born on Luzon in the Phillipines in 1977 but moved to the UK with her English father and Spanish Filipina mother within a month of her birth, forced out of the Philippines by a typhoon.  She was brought up in Nottingham where she made her fist stage appearance at the age of four.  Her full name is Rachel Louise Grant de Longueuil  and her father is the 12th Baron de Longueuil whose grandmother was a Bowes-Lyon and was closely related to the Queen Mother.  Technically she is third cousin to Princes Harry and William.

She came to London at the age of sixteen to study acting and whilst appearing in country soap Emmerdale  in 1999 didn't get her first regular TV role for seven years.  This was a role as a host for the Sci Fi channel's Fright Night in 2001.  That year she was also a body double for Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: (2001) as she is the same height: 5'8".

In 2002 she was cast as a masseuse called Peaceful Fountains of Desire in a speaking role in the twentieth James Bond film Die Another Day (2002) where she had a scene with Pierce Brosnan.  Here she is at the film's world premiere.

Adding the Bond Girl role to her qualifications has kept her in work (if not exactly stellar work) ever since.   She was Myang Li on Brainiac from 2003 until 2007 and appeared in a number of small TV and film roles.  She has also done quite a lot of TV advertising work.

She is active in charity work, especially in the Philippines, where she is considerably more well known that over here.

Rachel in New York

Rachel is a sports car enthusiast and has taken part in several rallys in the US including the Ferrari only Tour of the Hamptons and the Bullrun Rally driving from New York to Los Angeles.

She is also interested in travel and had her own travel slot on Cathay Pacific's in-flight travel show and writes for the Asian magazine Travelife.

Another big part of her life is martial arts and she has studied Filipino martial arts, in particular, Kali and Silat. She learned blade and stick fighting from Grandmaster Danny Inosanto: a training partner of Bruce Lee.  She has been featured in a number of martial arts magazines and is an experienced instructor.

Red Princess Blues

This expertise helped her win the best fight award at the Shockfest film festival in Los Angeles for her appearance in the short film Red Princess Blues (2010) (for which she took the best actress award too).

She was a finalist in Miss Great Britain and Miss Hawaiian Tropic and as a youngster would take part in drama competitions.

So, actress, model, martial arts instructor, travel writer and photographer, the very busy Miss Grant splits her time between London, New York and the Philippines.

A very worthy Bond Girl Venus!

Venus in black stockings 1: Lesley-Anne Down

Lesley Anne Down in the Alberto episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, first broadcast 16th November 1975

In a world where there were only three television channels, TV watching in the seventies was a much more communal affair for families than it is today.    No tablets, no smart phones, no home computers, no video recording devices to enable time shifting.  If you wanted to watch something on TV you had to be sat down in front of it at the appointed time.  

One of the programmes that Agent Triple P had to endure, during family viewing at the weekends in the early Seventies, was Upstairs, Downstairs, which was very much Downton Abbey's forebear.  A largely tedious (for a teenager) tale of aristocrats and their servants it had very little of interest for Agent Triple P.  However, from series three the programme was considerably enlivened by the presence of the luminously beautiful Lesley-Anne Down, who was just nineteen when she first appeared in it.

One scene involving her has stuck in Triple P's mind for nearly forty years and recently we were delighted to find an illustration of her from this scene.  In the episode Alberto, from the fifth and final series from 1975, Lesley-Anne, as Georgina Worsley, is offered a role in a film, Paris by Night.  Jealous suitor James Bellamy (Simon Williams) turns up at the studio concerned about the whole thing and quite rightly, it seems, as Lesley-Anne is wearing the sort of outfit that a young lady should not be seen in, even in the nineteen twenties.  As a fifteen year old to see quite such a risque outfit on prime time (not that that was a term in use in those days in the UK) weekend drama was a splendid surprise.

Our second dose of a be-stockinged Lesley Anne comes from the enjoyable Michael Crichton Victorian caper film The First Great Train Robbery (1979).  The film has much to recommend it, including Geoffrey Unsworth's photography, a good recreation of Victorian London (shot in Dublin), an engaging performance by Sean Connery (doing some amazingly risky stunts on top of a moving train) and a marvellous score by Jerry Goldsmith; the main theme from which is particularly hard to get out of your head once you have heard it.

Lesley-Anne also puts in a splendid performance and is particularly eye-catching in some, we have to admit, rather anachronistic lingerie.   Still, it catches the spirit of saucy Victorian underwear even if it has been somewhat modernised.

The image of her in her corset and stockings was so strong it featured, not surprisingly, in the film's posters.  The pose of her in the version of the poster above made a strong impression on Agent Triple P years before he actually saw the film.  The poster art is by top American poster artist Tom Jung who is famous for his work on such iconic posters for films like Doctor Zhivago and Star Wars.

More of Miss Down soon.  Next up, her fetching publicity shots for Sphinx (1981)

Centrefold Venus of the Month 42: Hilary Stephens/Caroline Crowther, November 1977

We haven't had a Mayfair centrefold since February 2010 so thought it was about time we had another young lady from that most British of men's magazines.  Amidst the regular articles on old cars, World War 2 exploits and such like were rather more pictorials than the likes of Penthouse and Playboy had.

This issue, like the previous one we have featured comes from 1977.  Mayfair had refused to be dragged into the competition between the other magazines (principally Men Only, Club International, Fiesta, Knave and Penthouse in the UK) to become ever more explicit from the end of 1975.  Although by 1977 there was, just occasionally, a glimpse of labia in some of their pictorials.

Mostly, however, they presented young ladies like "Hilary" here who were usually quite obviously British.  They had none of the polished sensuality of the European girls who often featured in Club International and none of the overt sexuality of the Penthouse models.  This is not to say that they were unattractive but it was a real not fantasy attractiveness; a sort of busty barmaid down at the local pub approach.

Mayfair tended to take two approaches with its description of its women: they were either secretaries or hairdressers or very posh country or Chelsea types.  The implication being, often, that they had not posed before.  This, of course, was exactly the approach Bob Guccione had taken with Penthouse, which had been launched just under a year before Mayfair's August 1966 first issue in the UK.   In Penthouse's case, however, often his girls were first timers (initially they had to be to be Pet of the Month) and many of them were quite posh, as he used to pick them up from exclusive secretarial colleges on the King's Road.  In Mayfair the girls were often (sometimes quite well known) models.  

Anyway, the editor obviously decided that Hilary was going to be one of their posh girls, working as an estate agent and living in Fulham (not quite as posh as Chelsea but nearly) who had got into jolly scrapes at her boarding school.

Whatever, Hilary was posed in typical Mayfair style on location, inside, with typically gloomy weather visible through the windows.  We can't say that we are very inspired by her clothes in this pictorial and the wrinkled stockings don't do much for her either.  A detail that Hugh Hefner would have never let get into Playboy.

She does have a nice figure although the poses that she assumes don't always show it at its best and it would have been nice to see what another photographer might have done with her.  Photographer for this pictorial was David Hinton about whom we can find nothing whatsoever.

Hilary does not seemed to have posed again for Mayfair or any other magazines and that is probably due to the fact that she was shortly about to meet the man she would marry.

Hilary Stephens is, in fact, Caroline Crowther and was the daughter of Leslie Crowther, at the time one of the biggest stars on British TV.   Crowther's TV career started in the nineteen fifties and he was a presenter, compere and, latterly, game show host whose TV shows were some of the highest rated on television, including the UK version of The Price is Right.  Leslie Crowther was in a terrible car crash in 1992 from which he never fully recovered and died in 1996.

Caroline was one of five children and her sister, Liz, is an actress who became well known for her part as a radio station receptionist in the Bristol-set detective series Shoestring from 1979 to 1980.  Caroline was working for top British rock publicist Tony Brainsby when she met Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, who were one of Brainsby's clients.

By 1978 she was pregnant with Lynott's child and they got married on Valentine's day 1980 at which point Caroline was five months pregnant with her second child.  The wedding was in a freezing cold church in Richmond, south west London, and the reception was at the Kensington Hilton.  During his speech at the reception Caroline's father famously said "When Philip asked for my daughter's hand in marriage I said,'Why not? You've had everything else!'"  

The wedding was attended by a host of figures from the pop world including Billy Idol and members of Thin Lizzy, Motorhead, Dire Straits, Bad Company and Midge Ure, who had played in Thin Lizzy for a time before forming Ultravox.

Source: BrandNewRetro

This picture comes from the Record Mirror coverage of the wedding, the text for which was written by Paula Yates, who we have featured as a non-centrefold of the month for her 1979 Penthouse shoot.

Caroline left Lynott in 1984, with her children, as his heroin use had got increasingly out of control.  But when Lynott collapsed on Christmas Day 1985 it was Caroline who drove him to a drugs clinic but he died on January 4th  1986.  

A magnificent rear!

We think Caroline is really rather splendid and the very average presentation of her in Mayfair just adds to her girl next door allure.