Venus Passing: Alexandra Bastedo 1946-2014

Agent Triple P was sorry to hear of the death of actress and animal campaigner Alexandra Bastedo last weekend.

One of the most beautiful women to appear on TV (actually, one of the most beautiful women to appear anywhere) she was most famous, and best remembered by Agent Triple P, for her appearance as Sharon Macready in the ITC thriller The Champions in 1968.  

Born in Hove, on the south coast of England, she got her first film role by winning a competition when she was sixteen. She flew to Hollywood to make the film The Candy Web (1965) and Alfred Hitchcock offered her work but her parents made her return to school. She was due to go to university but picked up some minor TV roles in her gap year so decided to stick with acting.

Casino Royale

In 1967 she had a brief role in the alternative James Bond film Casino Royale starring David Niven.

AT the age of twenty she was cast in The Champions where she was part of a team of agents working for the Nemesis organisation.   During a mission they crash land in Tibet and are given enhanced human powers by mysterious monks.  In the series, Miss Bastedo always looked very much like an enhanced human.

Unlike, for example, the later The Persuaders from the same company, The Champions was a low budget effort with no location shooting at all.  Miss Bastedo, however, always looked luminous in every episode in a collection of a la mode clothing.

The series was particularly popular in Spanish speaking countries and as a result Alexandra appeared in a number of Spanish speaking films; eventually earning to speak Spanish fluently (as well as Italian and French).

Pirelli Calendar

In 1970 she appeared in the famous Pirelli Calendar photographed by Francis Giacobetti.  Famously she refused to take off her clothes for the shoot.

Stigma

Her shyness seemed to have disappeared by the time she made a series of films in Spain during the seventies and early eighties. Including Stigma (1980) by the Spanish director of cult British horror Vampyres (1974), which starred Playboy Playmate Anulka Dziubinska.

With Brian Blessed (playing a Cypriot!) in The Aphrodite Inheritance

Triple P also remembers her in the effective and unusual Cyprus-set British TV thriller The Aphrodite Inheritance 1979).

Eventually, fed up with all the travelling, she settled down, cut right back on her TV work and married theatre director Patrick Garland. who had a long association with Chichester Festival Theatre in Sussex.  Her final screen credit was a tiny part in Batman Begins (2005).

Always interested in animal welfare she set up the ABC Animal Sanctuary in Sussex.  Over the last few years she had been struggling against; cancer, the appearance of which she blamed on taking two many fertility pills in her thirties as she tried, unsuccessfully, for a child.

Still stunning in her sixties

By all accounts she was a woman who was as intelligent, cultured and compassionate as she was beautiful.  She was 67.

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Disappointing Anniversary Venus: Kate Moss

The Fantasy

Playboy is 60 years old this month which is a very good run for any magazine.  For some reason, however, even though the first issue came out in December 1953 Playboy always celebrate their anniversaries in the January.  December's Playboy gives us a preview of their big name anniversary celebrity for the January issue: British model Kate Moss.

The reality

Agent Triple P is very disappointed by this.  We have never found Moss remotely attractive, let alone sexy.  She is (allegedly) a chain-smoking, drug-taking, drunk whose looks (what they were) disappeared years ago.  She will be forty next month but there are many attractive forty year olds around (perhaps Hefner should have gone for an attractive sixty year old!).  Without Photoshop she wouldn't have a career at all.  She must need quite a lot of Photoshop too.  We are reminded of a friend of ours who has a contact in the record industry who told him that whenever Robbie Williams (an inexplicably popular, with a certain sort of woman, pop star) records anything they have to put his voice through Autotune several dozen times.  Equally Moss must need a large amount of digital enhancement time spent on her substance-ravaged face.

Some years ago

It's not like we haven't seen her naked dozens of times before either and even by asexual, skinny, fashion model standards her body is at the ordinary end of the spectrum.  She is just a thin woman with photogenic cheekbones.  But these give her what our friend Agent DVD would call a "hard" face.  Lots of people must be impressed by her, however, as, despite a huge drugs scandal years ago she continues to work, despite what the UK press predicted.  Triple P used to have a (sadly deceased) friend who used to describe the attractiveness of women in various Baltic countries on a scale using Kate Moss as the gold standard.  "She's a Kate Moss plus 1. She's a Kate Moss plus 2" etc.)  We just can't see it.  

Hefner should have just banged $10 million down and gone for Scarlett Johansson, who would have been a worthy person to grace the pages of the anniversary special.  Or Mila Kunis (although we don't understand her appeal either) or Rihanna. Good grief, even Miley Cyrus would have been better than Moss!  Although maybe she is waiting for an offer from Hustler.

Let's just hope that the 60th anniversary Playmate is up to scratch!

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Flexible Venus 4: Scarlett Strallen

There is no doubt about the most striking and erotic poster on the London Underground at present: it is this one of Scarlett Strallen promoting the new revival of A Chorus Line.  It's not just the impossible angle of those extraordinary legs.  It's not just the muscle tone in those silky thighs.  Its the insouciant look in her eyes which seem to say: "Look I can stretch my legs like this and it's no effort whatsoever.  Imagine what else I can do!"  Indeed!

Thirty year old Scarlett Aimee Vaigncourt-Strallen has been a fixture of the London musical stage since she took the lead in Mary Poppins in 2005.  Her three sisters Saskia, Summer and Zizi are all actresses as well.  More alarmingly she is the niece of former stage school moppet and, later, Dr Who companion Bonnie Langford.

Splendid!

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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!

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Venus in black stockings 2: Kelly Brook

There are, disappointingly, comparatively few pictures of Miss Brook in black stockings, an unusual situation for a young lady who spends much of her time posing about in lingerie.  Still, we have two fine examples here: one in hold ups and one in suspenders (or a garter belt if you are a North American).

The one above looks effectively slutty, probably because she is wearing a dress rather than just a boudoir concoction as in the one below (in which she looks very young).  The illicit flash of stockings in everyday wear is so much more potent than seeing them on an undressed girl.  Triple P remembers a meeting where he sat next to a girl from HM Treasury who not only flashed the tops of her stockings when seated but spent the whole meeting pinging her suspender straps against her leg.  Most distracting!

We note that poor Kelly broke up with her boyfriend this week, mainly, it seems, because she kept going to meet the previous one.  We imagine that she won't be on the market for very long.

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Venus in a Vest 3: Anna Noble

Here are some splendid photographs of Anna Noble in a vest taken as a part of a shoot that appeared in Mayfair magazine in 1975.

Close observation shows that her garment is actually a very pale shade of pink rather than the more classic white but that does in no way detract from its pleasing visual effect.

The remarkable thing about these pictures is that they show Anna with a totally untrimmed bush which, even for 1975, was somewhat unusual.  Obviously not shot at a bikini time of year her pubic hair runs right up to her belly button in an enticing trail.

Triple P prefers his women in vests to just wear a vest but in this case we really cannot object to a pair of black hold-up stockings as well.

We can't find any information on the lovely Miss Noble other than she started modelling for the Daily Mirror's equivalent of Page 3 in 1976.  She never appeared in The Sun and disappeared from he modelling scene at the end of the seventies.  

Anna in The Spy Who Loved Me title sequence

Mayfair ran a second pictorial of her in 1977 to tie in with her very brief appearance in the title sequence of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

Looking at this picture she has a fine coating of hairs down her thighs as well but as they are blonde they hardly show.  What delightfully furry girl she is!

Anna's bust is such, of course, that if you push her vest up to reveal it the garment has enough to rest on so it doesn't fall straight down again.

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Clubland Venus: Paula Yates at the Reform Club

Agent Triple P had dinner at the Reform Club on Pall Mall last week.  We go there reasonably often as we know a couple of members.  Given its exclusive nature we were rather surprised, when we recently picked up a copy of UK Penthouse on eBay (to fill a gap in Triple P's collection), to discover a pictorial shot in the club featuring a young Paula Yates.  Paula was a rock and pop journalist in the early eighties.

This came from UK Penthouse Volume 14 no 5 (August 1979) and the pictorial didn't appear in the US edition, of course, due to Paula only being well known in the UK.

Paula Yates was born in Wales in 1959, the daughter of an actress, former showgirl and erotic novelist.  Yate's mother's husband was Jess Yates a well known TV personality who presented the religious Sunday show Stars on Sunday.  Jess Yates career and his popular show ended in 1974 when it was revealed that the  fifty-six year old had been having an affair with Anita Kay, an actress thirty years his junior, although he was separated at the time.

The Reform Club library contains over 75,000 books

The journalist who broke the story about Jess Yate's affair was called Noel Botham, who was a friend of another TV presenter Hughie Green.  Jess Yates had been Green's producer on one of his shows but Green couldn't stand him and wanted him removed.  Green told Botham about Yate's affair with Kay who sold the story to the News of the World (recently closed down by Rupert Murdoch following revelations of systematic phone hacking).

When Hughie Green died in 1997 Botham a wrote another story for the News of the World revealing that it was Hughie Green who was Paula's biological father and not Jess Yates.  Green had revealed this to Botham  twenty years earlier.  Paula only learned of this through reading the tabloid headlines.  Her mother denied it but Paula then took a DNA test which revealed, following samples from two of Green's children, that she was, indeed, Green's daughter.

The upper corridor of the saloon

As a teenager Paula became a fan of new wave band The Boomtown Rats and its lead singer Bob Geldof, later famous for co-organising Live Aid.  She pursued Geldof and started having a relationship with him when she was sixteen or seventeen.  By the time this pictorial appeared her fame was almost entirely based on her relationship with Geldof.

Very soon, however, she began a column in the Record Mirror and in the early eighties started co-hosting the TV music show The Tube which increased her profile enormously.

The floor of the main saloon

In 1986, after ten years with Geldof and having had a daughter, Fifi Trixibelle, with him they got married in Las Vegas in 1986.  However, the previous year she had met Michael Hutchence, lead singer of Australian rock band INXS, whilst interviewing him for The Tube.  They kept in touch and by the time she interviewed him again on The Big Breakfast TV show in 1994 it was apparent from the sexually charged atmosphere that something was going on between them and, in fact, it had been for some time.  Strangely, this series of rock star interviews, which were always conducted on a bed and had Yates flirting with most of her guests, were actually produced by her husband.

This window is between the library and the Upper Corridor of the saloon

In 1995 she left Geldof and, under Hutchence's influence started to take drugs and indulge in S&M activities.  Hutchence abandoned his then girlfriend, supermodel Helena Christensen, for Yates.  In 1996 Paula  had another daughter, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, with Hutchence. In November 1997 Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room in Sydney.  Paula, increasingly distraught and then learning the truth about her father shortly afterwards, sought psychiatric help but lost custody of her daughters.  She was found dead of an overdose of heroin in September 2000 at the age of 41.

In some of these pictures Yates can be seen sporting a tattoo on her right arm which was most unusual in those days but may explain her daughter Peaches', addiction to them.

The Reform Club was founded in 1836 by Edward Elice MP, a former fur trader in Canada who had made his fortune as a director of the Hudson's Bay Company.  The idea of the club was that it should be a centre for the sort of radical politics that had led to The Reform Act of 1832, which Elice was a strong supporter of. This act reformed the electoral system of the UK taking the first significant steps towards the system we have today by increasing the number of eligible voters and establishing parliamentary seats in large industrial cities for the first time.

The club's building was designed by Sir Charles Barry (whose most famous building is the Palace of Westminster and its distinctive "Big Ben" tower) and was modelled on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (currently the French Embassy - Triple P went to a reception there once with his aristocratic lady friend I).

The balconied main saloon, where many of these pictures were taken is very much the most splendid room in any of the London clubs.  The upper level of the saloon leads, on it's southern side to the library which holds over 75,000 books.

The Upper Corridor of the saloon in 1841 Compare with the picture six from the top

There have been many famous members including Arthur Conan Doyle, HG Wells and Winston Churchill, who resigned however when one of his friends was blackballed. In Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days Phileas Fogg was a member of the club so his journey started and finished there.  It has appeared in numerous films most notably in the scenes at the fencing club in Die Another Day (2002) and, more recently, Sherlock Holmes (2009).

 The main staircase which leads from the Lower to the Upper Saloon

You are certainly not allowed to take pictures inside the club or use a mobile phone in the public areas.  We can't think that the club would allow a photo shoot like this today and wonder if there were any appalled letters to the club secretary at the time.

We never really liked Paula Yates and she subsequently had a nasty breast enlargement but here, as a nineteen year old, she looks rather splendid..  

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