American actress Nanette Fabray endorsing Lux soap in 1950

Miscellaneous Info – Read more about her HERE

Carole Lombard endorsing Lux Soap in 1935

Miscellaneous Info - Perhaps because of her tragic, early death, or maybe because she was blonde and gorgeous, Carole Lombard is revered even to this day as the crowning female practitioner of sophisticated 1930s comedy. She did indeed have a casual, sly way of bringing a lighter-than-air quality to good material. But she also had a habit of going into shrill decibels to achieve a laugh, her technique a mite frantic at times when a little more restraint would have sufficed. There is certainly no reason why Myrna Loy, Joan Blondell, or Claudette Colbert cannot be said to have given her more than a run for her money. While quite young her divorced mother moved her and her siblings to Los Angeles. There a chance meeting with director Allan Dwan led to Lombard being cast, in 1921, in a supporting part, as Monte Blue’s daughter, in A Perfect Crime, using her real name, Jane Peters. Four years later she was signed to a contract by Fox under the new name of “Carol Lombard” (adding the “e” to “Carol” when she joined Paramount five years later). She started at Fox with a leading role in Marriage in Transit, starring Edmund Lowe, and was soon off the screen while recovering from facial injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Her contract with Fox was dissolved, so she instead went to work for Mack Sennett in three short comedies, “The Girl From Everywhere,” “His Unlucky Night,” and “The Swim Princess.” She continued to find employment here and there, eventually landing a contract with Pathe, but making little impact until she reached Paramount in 1930, as part of the cast of a Buddy Rogers comedy, Safety in Numbers, playing a Follies girl. The studio was impressed enough to add her to the payroll, put­ting her in a pair of sophisticated comedies with William Powell, both of which had him playing gigolos, Man of the World and Ladies’ Man, with Lombard as one of the women stuck on him. They married in 1931 and spent two years as man and wife.

Paramount continued to let her strut her stuff, opposite Norman Foster (Up Pops the Devil, as a jealous dancer), Gary Cooper (I Take This Woman, as an heiress who marries a cowboy) and Ricardo Cortez (No One Man, torn between him and Paul Lukas). These didn’t quite push her into the upper echelons of stardom but she did get a chance to sparkle alongside Clark Gable on his one loan-out to Paramount, No Man of Her Own, in which she was a librarian intrigued by his interest in her. This was 1932, so it would be another seven years before they became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated, albeit short-lived, married couples. In the meantime she got top billing in an ensemble, From Hell to Heaven, inspired by the multi-character format of Grand Hotel, as a woman whose faith in her ex is riding on a horse race; a war film, The Eagle and the Hawk, billed simply as “The Beautiful Lady” and being denied any opportunity to emote opposite one of its stars, Cary Grant; and a thriller, Supernatural, as an heiress possessed by her dead sister, who had gone to the electric chair for murder. She was also in a trashy jungle melodrama, White Woman, proving just how bad she could be in a dramatic role, and Bolero, which brought attention to her dancing abilities. There was the requisite leading-lady duty opposite the studio’s big singing star, Bing Crosby, in We’re Not Dressing, pairing off with him very nicely in this story of a ship­wrecked snob finding love with a common sailor.

Columbia borrowed her on several occasions with middling results, including Virtue, trying to leave behind her life as a hooker; No More Orchids, another case of casting her as an upper class lady in love with someone “beneath” her station, in this case Lyle Talbot; and Brief Moment, in a misconceived turn, as a nightclub singer battling with tycoon husband Gene Reynolds, in characters based on Libby Hollman and tobacco millionaire Smith Reynolds.

The one that changed her fortunes was Howard Hawks’s high adrenalin comedy Twentieth Century, made over at Columbia. Lombard was the spoiled actress being pressured back into the business during a train trip by her egotistical mentor John Barrymore, and their frantic sparring went from sublime to downright exhausting in what turned out to be a smash hit at the box office. This did not mean that everything went swimmingly for Lombard from thereafter. For her home studio she and Gary Cooper had to share the screen with attention-grabbing moppet Shirley Temple in Now and Forever, and a sequel to Bolero was ordered, Rumba, which meant she was stuck with the unappe­tizing George Raft again. At MGM she got another batch of bad reviews playing a gold-digging showgirl trying to snare her share of bootlegger Nat Pendleton’s dough in The Gay Bride. Better was a pleasant teaming with Fred MacMurray, Hands Across the Table, in which she was a manicurist trying to trap a man. Around the time her contract with Paramount was coming to an end, she went over to Universal for the quickly forgotten Love Before Breakfast, and one of her finest, My Man Godfrey. As the ditsy, pampered millionaire’s daughter with a desperate crush on ser­vant William Powell, she was at her most inspired, receiving her one and only Oscar nomination. The movie is one of the peaks of the screwball comedy genre of the decade, as is Nothing Sacred. This was made for Selznick in color, with Lombard taken to the big city by opportunistic Fredric March, who makes her a celebrity because everyone thinks she is dying of radiation poi­soning. A smart satire on the media, Lombard was once again caught working overtime for laughs in more than one moment, the customarily more hammy March giving the more restrained and clever performance of the two.

Between these films Paramount decided to put her back with MacMurray for a shipboard romantic farce, The Princess Comes Across; a melodrama, Swing High, Swing Low, a version of the stage hit Burlesque, which became better known years later as the Betty Grable-Dan Dailey vehicle When My Baby Smiles at Me; and a stinker, True Confessions, with Lombard floundering as a pathological liar. Free from her Paramount contract, she went over to Warner Bros. for another limp one, Fools for Scandal, as an actress battling with impoverished nobleman Fernand Gravet, in a curious entertainment that inserted rhyming dialogue in a few places. There were surely better co-stars to be found than Gravet, and she got two of the best with James Stewart in Made for Each Other and Cary Grant in In Name Only, but, alas, these films both concentrated more on the serious despite light moments in each. Staying in a dramatic vein, she was ill at ease as Charles Laughton’s mail-order bride in They Knew What They Wanted, and then did the cute but instantly forgettable Mr. and Mrs. Smith, notable only because it was a romantic comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her next film turned out to be another of her high points, Ernst Lubitsch’s cult classic To Be or Not to Be, in which she was surprisingly well cast alongside Jack Benny as a pair of squabbling actors challenging the Nazis. Sadly, by the time it was released she was dead, having been killed in a plane crash while flying to sell war bonds, and leaving behind a grieving widower in Gable (they had married in 1939). Along with Leslie Howard, she was mourned as the greatest of Hollywood’s casualties of World War II, and one can only specu­late on the direction her career might have gone from the apex she had clearly reached at that point.

Indian actress Nimmi with Hollywood's actor Errol Flynn (Picture courtesy of Gettyimages)

Bollywood’s film Aan (1952) was one of the first Indian movies to have a world wide release. The film had extremely lavish premiere in London where Nimmi met many western film personalities including Errol Flynn. When Flynn attempted to kiss her hand she pulled it away, exclaiming, “I am an Indian girl, you cannot do that!” The incident made the headlines and the press raved about Nimmi as the “…unkissed girl of India”.

Silent Film Star Renée Adorée in a vintage Lux Soap Ad (1928) (Source - Ebay)

Miscellaneous Info - Renée Adorée was a French actress who appeared in Hollywood silent movies during the 1920s.

Ann Blyth and Craig Stevens in a vintage Lux Soap Ad (1950) (Source - Ebay)

Miscellaneous Info - She was groomed to be a singer, but it is for playing one of the screen’s great spoiled brats that Ann Blyth will be best remembered. A child prodigy, she began singing professionally at age 5, performed on the radio, and studied with the San Carlos Opera Company. Her acting break came with the Broadway produc­tion of Watch on the Rhine, as Paul Lukas’s daughter. When the play came to Los Angeles she was tested and signed by Universal. They started her as the second lead in some second-rate Donald O’Connor-Peggy Ryan musicals but, for­tunately, she was borrowed by Warner Bros., who cast her as Joan Crawford’s horrid, selfish daughter, Veda, in Mildred Pierce, a depiction that earned her an Oscar nomination and made her a star.

Her follow-up roles weren’t particularly impressive, ranging from a bitchy, younger version of Bette Davis in Another Part of the Forest (the prequel to The Little Foxes); to the silly fantasy, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, which attempted to sell her as a sex symbol; to a very lovely, but otherwise unremarkable colleen enchanted by Bing Crosby in one of his lesser vehicles, Top o’ the Morning. She took a lead in the grandiose soap opera, Our Very Own, about an adopted girl who tracks down her birth mother, and was the standard “loving wife” in Mario Lanza’s biggest hit, M G M’s The Great Caruso. Metro tried to make her a major singing star, but properties like the tired remake of Rose Marie, the mummified The Student Prince, and the best of the lot, Kismet, arrived at the end of M G M’s musical heyday and did little for her. She ended her movie career with two poorly received biopics, The Buster Keaton Story, as one of his wives; and The Helen Morgan Story, for which she was critically lam­basted. She retired to occasional summer stock appearances and concerts, and did a brief stint in the 1970s as spokesperson for Hostess Cupcakes.

Vintage Lux Advertisement from Indian Magazine (1940s)

Hollywood

Ann Blyth – Carole Lombard – Nanette Fabray – Renée Adorée

Bollywood

Chand Usmani – Hema Malini – Mridula – Nirupa Roy – Parveen Babi – Surya Kumari – Zeenat Aman

Lollywood

Mussarat Nazir – Nasreen – Yasmin

Ava Gardner in Pakistan (1955) during the shooting of Hollywood's Bhowani Junction (1956)

Hollywood’s Bhowani Junction (1956), starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger, was shot in and around Lahore, under the direction of George Cukor. Based on John Master’s novel, it was set in the post-World War II period, showing the inner conflict of a Eurasian woman, torn between commitment to the country of her birth and her love for a British colonel. The film is remembered for the striking photography of the location. It was perhaps the only Hollywood’s movie ever filmed in Pakistan – Mushtaq Gazdar

Clark Gable - Publicity shot for Mogambo (1953)

Joan Crawford - Publicity shot for Sudden Fear (1952)

Rita Hayworth - Publicity Shot for Affair in Trinidad (1952)