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VILMA BANKY 1930's - photo by Melbourne Spurr

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Dichen Lachmann will guest star in the recurring role of Anya

Images of art, design, fashion and fancy. 20 images of the same tone or color in a row. over and over and over again. Straight from a lady in the fine city of Portland, OR. Enjoy. -Jen-

"Mrs. Vernon Castle who set to-day's fashion in outline of costume and short hair for the young woman of America. For this reason and because Mrs. Castle has form to a superlative degree (correct carriage of the body) and the clothes sense (knowledge of what she can wear and how to wear it) we have selected her to illustrate several types of costumes, characteristic of 1916 and 1917." – Emily Burbank, Woman as Decoration, 1917. See the magazine page below. See the magazine page above. Photographed by Baron de Meyer. * Irene Castle (née Foote, 17 April 1893 in New Rochelle, New York - 25 January 1969, Eureka Springs, Arkansas), American dancer and actress, famous as half of the dancing pair Vernon and Irene Castle. The daughter of a physician, she studied dancing and performed in several amateur theatricals before meeting Vernon Castle in 1910. The following year, a month after she turned eighteen, the two were married and, soon after, they traveled to Paris, booked to perform in a dance revue. The show closed quickly, but the couple was then hired as a dance act by the Café de Paris. They performed the latest American ragtime dances, and were soon the rage of Parisian society. Their success was widely reported in the United States, and when they returned home, their success was repeated on a far wider scale. They were immediately in demand everywhere and quickly became staples on Broadway. In 1914, the couple opened a nightclub called "Castles by the Sea" on the Boardwalk in Long Beach, New York, a restaurant, "Sans Souci", and a dancing school called "Castle House". At the latter, they taught New York society the latest dance steps - Foxtrot, Maxixe, Bunny Hug, Tango, Hesitation Waltz, Turkey Trot, Castle Walk - by day, and greeted guests and performed at their club and cafe at night. They also were in demand for private lessons and appearances at fashionable parties. They wrote a best-selling book on dancing and appeared as themselves in films. The Castles were trendsetters in a number of arenas. Their elegance and respectability encouraged the acceptance of styles of dancing previously found rather "fast". And their performances were often set to ragtime and jazz rhythms, which helped bring African-American music to a white audience; their orchestra was made up of black musicians. Irene also became a major fashion trendsetter, her picture in all the papers, dressed by the famous couturier Lucile or in clothes she'd designed herself. She's also credited with bringing bobbed hair to America, as early as 1913-14, long before it became the dominant trend of the next decade. And beginning in 1917, she made eighteen films - most of which are lost - the last of which was Slim Shoulders in 1922. In her first film role, Patria, 1917. During World War I. "Mrs. Vernon Castle in her 'preparedness suit.' This is made on strictly mannish lines, and has no trimming whatever. She is shown here wearing the emblem of the British Royal Flying Corps, which was sent her by her husband, who is an aviator in this division. The suit is of covert tan cloth." When the First World War began, Vernon, who had been born in England, was eager to fight. Receiving his pilot's certificate in early 1916, he sailed to England and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. Over the Western Front, he completed three hundred combat missions, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was then posted to train new pilots, first in Canada and then near Fort Worth, Texas where, during a training flight in 1918, his plane crashed and he died soon after; he was only thirty. Stylish even in widowhood; wearing white mourning in Vogue magazine, photographed by Baron de Meyer, 1918. Back being a fashion plate, a year after Vernon's death. For several years after Vernon's death, Irene continued making films, continued appearing in magazines, an icon of fashion. She married three more times; she had two children with her third husband. In 1939, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their final RKO film together, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Irene served as technical advisor, but soon clashed with the production over the film's inaccuracies, from Rogers' un-bobbed, blonde hair, to the casting of the white Walter Brennan to play the couple's friend and servant Walter, who was black. She published the story of her life with her first husband, "Castles in the Air", in 1958. From the end of the Twenties she became a staunch animal-rights activist, a cause she was passionate about until the end of her life. She died at her Arkansas farm at the age of seventy-five, and was interred next to Vernon at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City.

Dorothy Sebastan

What's got into Bernadette?

Alberta Vaughn

CYD CHARISSE: 1922-2008 Actress danced into heart of Hollywood; Mary Rourke, Los Angeles Times Wednesday, June 18, 2008 (06-18) 04:00 PDT Los Angeles - -- Cyd Charisse, who brought sizzle and sophistication to dance in classic movie musicals such as "Singin' in the Rain" and "Silk Stockings," died Tuesday. She was 86. Ms. Charisse died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering an apparent heart attack Monday, publicist Gene Schwam said. Ms. Charisse captured moviegoers' attention in a quick succession of films, starting with "Singin' in the Rain" in 1952, in which she partnered with dancer and actor Gene Kelly in a steamy ballet. She was strong, lithe and "drop-dead gorgeous to look at," said Larry Billman, a dance/film historian and author of her breakthrough performance. She teamed with Kelly again in "Brigadoon" in 1954 and "It's Always Fair Weather" the next year. Ms. Charisse also danced with Fred Astaire, the premier dancer of his age, in major production numbers in the '50s. In "The Band Wagon" (1953), they danced to the music of "Dancing in the Dark" on a set that looked like New York City's Central Park. Four years later, Ms. Charisse and Astaire were partners in "Silk Stockings." Astaire said that Ms. Charisse was "beautiful dynamite" on screen. Ms. Charisse's other starmaker roles of the 1950s included "Deep in My Heart" (1954), in which she danced a sexy duet with James Mitchell. Unlike many top female dancers in the era of movie musicals, Ms. Charisse was trained as a ballerina in the Russian tradition. Earlier in her movie career, Ms. Charisse's dark hair and eyes led to some unlikely roles as "ethnic-exotic" characters in B movies such as "Fiesta" (1947), in which she played the Latina fiancee of actor Ricardo Montalban. She was cast as Polynesian in "On an Island With You," a song, dance and swim film starring Esther Williams in 1948. She was born Tula Ellice Fink- lea on March 8, 1922, in Amarillo, Texas. Her older brother nicknamed her Sid, a variation on Sis. In Hollywood, she changed the spelling to Cyd. She began ballet lessons at 6, encouraged by her father, Ernest, after she developed a mild case of polio that left her with a slight atrophy on her right side. During a family vacation in Los Angeles when she was 12, her parents enrolled her in ballet classes at a school in Hollywood. One of her teachers was Nico Charisse. As a teenager, she returned to the school as a full-time student. Not long afterward, Col. W. de Basil, the director of the Ballet Russe dance company, visited the school and saw her dance. He invited her to join his company, and she toured with it. In 1939, while she was in France on tour with the ballet company, she and Nico Charisse eloped. They had one son, Nico, before their marriage ended in divorce in 1947. Ms. Charisse then married singer and nightclub entertainer Tony Martin in 1948. The couple had one son, Tony Martin Jr., and her sons survive her, along with two grandchildren. Martin and Ms. Charisse settled in Hollywood soon after their marriage. One of her earliest movies was "Something to Shout About" (1943), in which she performed in a ballet. She captured wider attention three years later in "Ziegfield Follies," when she had a brief featured moment with the film's star, Fred Astaire. It led to her signing a seven-year contract with MGM Studios in 1946. In the '60s, Ms. Charisse performed cabaret shows while she continued working in Hollywood in films such as "Two Weeks in Another Town" (1962). She made frequent guest appearances on popular television series, including "Hawaii Five-O" and "The Love Boat" in the 1970s and "Murder She Wrote" in the 1980s. She also worked in theater, performing in "Charlie's Girls" in London in the 1980s and making her Broadway debut as an aging Russian ballerina in "Grand Hotel" in 1992. She was 70 when she first appeared on Broadway. PHOTO SOURCE: www.doctormacro.info