Posted on 01/17/2005 4:12:25 PM PST by JellyJam
Virginia Mayo, the beautiful blond who rose to movie stardom in the 1940s in comedies opposite Bob Hope and Danny Kaye and had memorable dramatic turns with James Cagney in "White Heat" and Dana Andrews in "The Best Years of Our Lives," died today. She was 84.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
My wife is beautiful, but she shows the signs of having HAD MY CHILDREN!!! and this TURNS ME ON!!!
She was a swell kid and had great gams.
I remember when I was a boy that you could turn on the TV almost every day and find at least two or three old black and white movies on. Now, thanks to Ted, those days are gone and we are stuck with 90 channesl of infomercials and crap. We were thinking about buying a new large screen HDTV but frankly, whats the point 98% of the stuff on tv is junk or PC crud.
" She was living proof that there is a god"
"First to have known someone as beautiful as Virginia Mayo - and second, NOT to have married her."
Very good, RC. And very true.
I was not the only teenage boy who was out of his mind. Everyone was who knew her.
I truly would have done anything she wanted me to do. And I was otherwise level headed.
She was also very sweet, very gentle, and very gracious, and she had a wonderful talent of making you feel that you were the only person in the world, and the most important, even in a crowded room. And her voice was beautiful, soft and low, an excellent thing in a woman.
What can I say...?
Clearly the memory still stirs me.
Oh, I remember her from WHITE HEAT and THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (she played Dana Andrews wife-from-hell). Didn't know she was still alive.
Interestingly, Ted Turner also knew the beautiful girl I have described.
TCM is well worth the price.... I think it's part of most basic cable packages now (it is for me). It shows a lot better stuff than HBO or Showtime. AMC has become unwatchable - commercials drive me nuts!
Now that's a set of gams!!!
So you're either a lady, really old or both.
My condolences to your family. I repeat my point, however. She is in a far better place. The only sorrow is for those left behind who will miss her till they meet again.
She was one of the good ones in her profession. Luckily she lived in the first generation when performances such as hers were recorded FOREVER. She will be remembered by far more than remembered people of even greater talents who lived before her.
She had her chance and she took it, made the most of it and got it recorded for posterity. Not a bad deal, when all is said and done, for a professional epitaph. I will leave all other considerations to those that knew her.
I think you have a winning idea.
Jane Fonda?
Oh, they were sophistocated about alcohol, they just didn't enjoy the science of alcohol tolerance, and neither did the Dayton Group and others who lead each other into the only real "cure" for the terminal illness of dypsomania most drinkers never suffer from.
In the case of The Best Years of Our Lives alcohol was an imortant part of the story, for the maladjusted whose middle American families were intact, as well as the recreational drinker played by Virginia Mayo.
Few people know, for example, that Alcohol was consumed in early independent America in quantities far in excess of those times in our history most associated with high consumption, more than three and a half times the amount consumed today, per capita. Until around 1820, refusing a drink offered was a fighting offense.
The history of alcohol and America is a facinating story, and with regard to the "Greatest Generation," the consumption of alcohol in Best Years was vital to illustrate both the daunting adaptation to the end of the necessary war and the end of stratification of an imposed class military hierarchy replaced with a retyurn to the American ideal of equality.
Drink up.
Can't be bothered? TCM is the ONLY reason to continue to pay anything for cable's higher tiers. It is the channel you're describing, to a tee.
Why should such Glory be "free?"
Unless and until TCM goes "AMC," I'll pay for the extra tier... for more than 100 years of the deepest vault out there. I gotta hand it to Terrible Ted for making that collection available, and for the preservation and presentation of most of the history of real cinema.
stretch here...The Old Geezer
Don't forget me... I am stil living. The Best Years Of our Life is my favorite movie. I was in The army Air Corps when that movie was made... and it really brings back memories... Frederick March and Myrna Loy. I forget the name of the sailor with no hands but he also had a great part.... Good, Good movie.
Me too, for the first time. WHAT a GREAT MOVIE!
Puts me in the mind of Oscar Wilde's remark that it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Dicken's Little Nell. I agree, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the "The Best Years of Our Lives".
Thanks for the sad ping, bud...
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