Everyone and everything is so accessible nowadays, the mystery has gone. And it was that added to their allure.

She was a true beauty.

The stars of the past appealed to adult men, as opposed to teenage boys. The boys loved them too of course, but largely because they offered a glimpse of a world of very grown up glamour. Charming though many of today's woman stars are, the world they inhabit, on or off-screen, doesn't seem like something I would wish to aspire to.

There are some gorgeous actresses around today but they're in our faces day after day.
You never saw Audrey Hepburn walking down 5th Ave. with a cup of Costa in one hand and a mobile in the other.
They were aloof, almost untouchable and everything about them was controlled by the studio. Could you ever imagine Deborah Kerr (No relation) being pictured without looking stunning.
They were never photographed without permission and there private life was just that, private.
On a Thursday afternoon they probably looked and felt like shit but you never saw it unlike now.

Because we know too much about today's movie "stars." The star machine 40 or 50 years ago was far more controlled. Those women were more mysterious. Maybe once a month you saw a picture of them in a movie magazine, attending a premier. You didn't see them ALL the time. Now we see, immediately, endless photos of Natalie Portman at the Screen Actors Guild, at the Oscars, at the Globes, at this premiere or that one, or walking down the street with a nonfat, decafe latte -- with endless silly comments about how good or bad she looked. No mystery.

No

You only have to look at the oscars coverage. The glamomiter level has really nose dived (male and female). That's not to say that the current crop do not look great in a nice frock or best bib and tucker but it all seems a little bit ordinary by comparison.

The stars from that era were largely portrayed as inaccessible and therefore their beauty became part of that inaccessibility. They were groomed by the studio system to behave in a way that helped to maintain the idea of Hollywood as a pantheon of the Gods. Look but don't touch, fall in love but never hope to consummate - unless you're a prince or a president.

Perhaps as well the beauty of these actresses was important as a way for cinema to compete with television. You could only see the full force of such jaw-dropping beauty on the big screen. The lines are too blurred now between TV and cinema.

Physically speaking many of the stars of today are probably as beautiful but the artifice has been lost, the complicity between studio, agent and press has gone. It's no longer about saving the moment for the big screen it's about saving it for the PR machine.

And for a lot of the reasons mentioned already. But I think the standard of acting is better now - on the whole anyway.

There is always a tendency to romanticise the past. In thirty years, the teenagers of today will be looking at the movie stars of 2041 and saying "they're not a patch on the likes of Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman and Scarlett Johansson."

I know in the series she's costumed and made up for the period but I think she is a stunningly classical beauty.

Certainly the only modern day actress that I can think of off the top of my head that could match Liz Taylor, Audrey Hepburn etc.

but we're still obsessed with what someone looks like. Who cares? Can they act and are they leading a decent, happy life?

even when they were in relatively gritty roles, they still look done up to the nines.

Grace Kelly not only never shaved her head and got made up to look as though she'd been tortured and left to rot in a filthy cell, she never would have.

In my opinion, Natalie Portman is every bit as beautiful as those you mention (and more so than at least one of them), but it's difficult to compare how stars were presented then to now.

Penelope Cruz

but I think the cinematographers of the golden age of Hollywood were absolutely masterful at lighting and framing the leading ladies of the time in such a way so as to maximize their natural attractiveness. Also I think the fashion world was more concerned with "beauty" in those days than is the case today. Now it's more about finding women who are striking looking rather than classically pretty.

At least size 0 didn't matter much in those days, although they had their own aesthetic set of norms to fiddle along with.

I think a lot of it comes down to attraction as opposed to just beauty: an actor/actress doesn't have to be the most beautiful person in the merry land in order to be attractive. I don't think Honor Blackman was the most gorgeous woman who ever skirted the earth, but boy, was she (and, indeed, is she) attractive. More so than Ursula Andress, who was probably better looking. Conversely, you could line up the last ten Bond girls, and I doubt I'd recognise any of them (cf Sienna Miller, who appears to be a bit of a weak cup of tea). Most of them seem to be attractive by default - there's nothing wrong with them, rather than something right. Even with the chaps: Vincent Cassell is more engaging than, say, Orlando Bloom, despite looking like he's just been in a fight after staying up 'til 4 in the morning.

I'd say that time adds a certain allure to the actors of the past. We only remember the particularly good ones lets face it.

The thing about the 50's is there was also plenty of scandal rags (Confidential etc) raking over grim details of certain people's lives (generally the gay ones).

Personally I think people like Julianne Moore, Scarlett Johansen, Natalie Portman and Laura Linney are well up there with the stars of the past.

... I think it's also something to do with perceptions of age - girls used to want to be women, now they want to stay girls (i.e. young) forever. Lauren Bacall was 19 when she squared off against Bogey (45!) in "To Have And Have Not", and was basically sex on legs. Nowadays a 19-year-old actress will still be playing 14, and hoping to be still playing teenagers until she's 30 - it's a different world.

... I think Rosamund Pike is up there with any 50s star. Definitely going to give this week's BBC4 dramatisation of "Women in Love" a try. The presence of Rachel Stirling as co-star is just an extra blob of clotted cream on the scone.

Yes and No

Some of the 'beauties' of yesteryear weren't all that, just as some of today's beautiful actresses aren't.

As mentioned, today's lack of privacy plays a part. The production line method of churning the beautiful stars of golden age Hollywood, the deportment classes and the strong hold the studios had on the media at the time, keeping the stars image out there just as the producers at the time wanted it. Glamour, innit. Bewitchment and enchantment. Doesn't really hold when the starlets of today are out there flashing their knickers or guesting on The Office (or wherever).

And the style (and glamour) at the time was brought out brilliantly by some of the black and white photography.

So, over all, not so glamourous now, no. Beautiful, yes

.

Resists the test of time. Ageing beautifully is a privilege of those who go thru life with their loved ones.

You could also argue that most don't have the screen presence of the likes of Cary Grant and Clark Gable.
And I think the term is 'screen presence'. There are plenty of 'pretty boys' around (Orlando Bloom, Jude Law, etc). But do any of them have the indefinable star quality of some of the matinee idols of the past? I'm afraid Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt just can't cut it compared to the gravitas, masculinity and charm of some of the old-school movie stars.
I'm sure in the past a lot of this has to do with the public's lack of knowledge about the stars' everyday lives. The stunning black and white cinematography also helped. There was a certain type of glamorous role that many idols never veered away from; the rakish charmer in the tuxedo and the femme fatale combo served many classic pairings very well.
In terms of modern film stars, I'd say that only George Clooney has anywhere near the same kind of old fashioned, manly charm:

Now there's a phrase I never thought I'd write.

He was on Radio 5 saying that today's actresses are just as beautiful but they dress up "scruffily" when they are not acting. What I took that to mean was that old style Hollywood players were always "on" in public, nowadays when not playing a part actresses dress like civilians. This is probably down to the aforementioned increase in accessibility beyond The Red Carpet.

Old style Hollywood was encapsulated by The Great Oz command: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." Today, the Great Oz would include a DVD extra with a title like "Pulling back the curtain: how did we REALLY do it?"

My favourite 'film stars' are all from years gone by. But if Audrey Tautou knocked on the front door and wanted to whisk me away somewhere foreign, I'd be sorely tempted.

These pictures are over fifty years old, but they seem contemporary. Most people now would look at the pictures above and say they were beautiful women.

Would anybody in the fifties have looked at pictures of Ethel Barrymore or Jean Harlow, from only twenty or thirty years before that, and still thought them beautiful? Or that Audrey Hepburn represented a falling off of standards? There was a shift to a new idea of beauty, which we still share.

I don't know if Hollywood caused this or just followed it, but it's a bit like the shift in popular music in the sixties. That seems closer to us now, forty or fifty years later, than it does to the music only twenty years before it.

the last Hollywood actress to have that classic 40s/ 50s look and whatnot was Kathleen Turner in her heyday.
Not now though....

over simplification, but grace, deportement and style come into it and, this might sound horribly oafish & sexist, but they also wanted to be loved and show off. They weren't embarassed by this, I think. Of course there was a tragedy behind with all their lives and whilst we remember them now after so many years off-screen because they are icons, I would imagine top billing actresses now have better lives in the sense that they have more control and don't have to play the man's game so much. Whilst we're on the subject, can I also plug the luscious Virna Lisi, coming out of the cake in How to murder your wife...cor blimey, that's what I call grace and deportement..

Agree with Ganglesprocket re: Laura Linney though, brilliant in The Big C.

Grace Kelly.

And I say that as a brunette preferrer.

fact fans. (no not Bab's knockers)

has a lot to answer for...

This is the big difference, which accounts for the otherwise impenetrable argument over whether or not Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant have 'something' that Scarlett Johansson and Brad Pitt do not (apart from being better actors in much better films). We see into every corner of a celebrity life in a fashion not possible one generation ago, so for all of their 'specialness' they seem somehow so ordinary. 50 years ago you could only see Liz Taylor on either a movie screen or in an inky gossip rag, while now someone has close-ups of Scarlett's cellulite posted on their public blog for all the world to see.

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2009/05/11/modern-day-hollywo...

Sorry

certainly for possessing glamour, beauty, curves and decent acting chops

all the "classic" actresses we remember have survived some sort of selection procedure to join the pantheon, over the decades, whereas the contemporary ones haven't and only time will tell if they do

edit: yay it's 0115hrs and i'm full of pith

Glamour used to be about the make-up, the hair, the clothes; now 'glamour' means waxjobs and lack of clothes.

Girls are being constantly shown by the media that they can be famous, rich and lauded for flashing their intimates to the world. It's nothing to do now with being 'mysterious', dignified, somehow elevated above the daily muck and banality everyone else is mired in.

Female actors push the envelope now. Many of the current box office bankers - Streep, Mirran, Kidman, Foster, Portman - are multi-dimensional in their roles and regarded as highly-talented in their craft. Even being described as actors rather than actresses is part of this. 'Glamour' is almost too restrictive.

Only Penelope Cruz fits your 'luminous beauty' mould of the 40s & 50s. Many of the others - especially Natalie Portman - could have chosen that path but actively have not.

There have been some fantastic lead actress performances recently - Michelle Williams, Natalie Portman, Hailee Steinfeld.
In terms of modern allure and beauty, Scarlett Johansson gets my vote, but her performances/films, apart from Lost In Translation, don't quite match up. January Jones is also wonderful, albeit you're seeing her through the Mad Men lens.

but my lap top is getting fixed and I'm posting this from a work PC.

Will someone please post a picture of the great Hedy Lamarr? now that was a good looking lass who even beat Liz Taylor for sheer magnetic beauty. She even shagged Hitler and Mussolini - though not at the same time obviously.

Attitudes to beauty change, but really, there are just as many beautiful stars today as there ever were. I think the bias and reverence we all display towards the past is a result of the fact that we tend to only remember the most stunning shots of the most stunning stars - Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren. So we forget that there were also a thousand others who were pretty good - but not quite as memorable.

And I have also seen photographs of Taylor, Hepburn, Loren, Monroe etc that were not especially enticing or glamourous. The image produced on a specific shoot or for a specific film is often a highly refined construct. We should not get sucked into assuming that startling beauty is some kind of absolute and intangible thing. Every star knows how much effort it takes to construct and maintain an image that looks naturally and effortlessly beautiful.