Fantasy Girlfriend leftovers

Since the blogs are about to go poof! (Hadn't you heard? The End of the World is coming!), I find myself in an unseemly rush to polish off a lot of posts I've had planned for a while (well, everything from a few days to three years) but haven't got around to. And my regular series are going to be cut off in their prime, with many projected future instalments now never to see the light of day.

I do have one final 'Fantasy Girlfriend' post planned for next weekend (an ultimate glamour icon, the fantasy girlfriend par excellence - can you guess who it might be?), but this week, here's a rundown of some of the gorgeous ladies who failed to make the cut.

Alas, no, there'll now never be a 'Fantasy Girlfriend' tribute to many of my favourite female singers... like the exquisite Linda Thompson, or any of these recently memorialised over on The Barstool, or the outrageously sexy Mylène Farmer ("the French Madonna", a recommendation of my cosmopolitan buddy Little Anthony; there's a very stylish mini-movie to accompany her song Libertine - I don't care for the music, but the raunch is great fun!), or - if I were to delve a little further back - like Grace Slick and Joan Baez. Ah, Joan Baez.

There'll never be another post on a favourite actress (some, but not all, of whom I've previously listed here). The omission of Jenny Agutter will particularly rile my friend The British Cowboy. At least we can enjoy a picture of her here.

Heck, I could have had a whole series on French actresses, but the fabulous Isabelle Huppert is the only one to have found a place in this strand. How did I omit Isabelle Adjani, Miou-Mou, Emmanuelle Béart, Anne Parillaud, Eva Green, Audrey Tautou, and so many others? How did I omit Sophie Marceau? Especially Sophie Marceau in La Fille de d'Artagnan?! (Dressed as a man. Leather tunic. Swashbucking swordplay. Thigh-boots. Oh, my!)

Looking back to an earlier era, how did I omit such haunting crushes of my childhood as Romy Schneider (notably in What's New, Pussycat?) and Jean Seberg (notably in The Mouse That Roared)? Or Catherine Deneuve (still gorgeous today; in the Sixties, perhaps the most beautiful woman on the planet)??

I never got around to doing a post on a female comedian, although there have been several I've had a soft spot for over the years (humour is one of the highest expressions of intelligence; and intelligence is the ultimate sexy for me): Ellen DeGeneres (yes, yes, I know), or the stunning redhead Joely Fisher, who played her best friend in her '90s sitcom, or Carol Cleveland (glamorous foil to the Pythons), or the lovely Australian stand-up Sarah Kendall (who I met at the Edinburgh Fringe some years ago), or the delightfully ditsy and deadpan surreal Hattie Hayridge.

I'll never now do a post on Audrey Hepburn (or will I??). Perhaps just as well: I fear my words would be inadequate to do her justice.

Nor on Barbara Eden, as Jeannie in I Dream Of Jeannie - my favourite TV programme when I was 9 or 10. (Although, actually, I somehow rather preferred her evil sister, Jeannie II. I wonder if this is because I have an unfortunate attraction to a mean streak in women, or if it's just that I prefer brunettes to blondes. They were both played by Barbara Eden, anyway; it was her charm that made the characters so appealing. And she's a blonde. Not that I'm immune to blondes, of course. Far from it!)

Nor on Jane Fonda - particularly Jane Fonda as Barbarella! (Although Jane Fonda as Cat Ballou also makes a strong claim.) The infamous opening sequence where she strips off her spacesuit in zero-gravity is one of my earliest and most enduring erotic memories (I caught a glimpse of it on late-night TV when I was about six, before being hastily despatched to bed by my embarrassed parents).

Nor on 'Lady Helen Manners' (mentioned on here once before, back in the early days) - an English society beauty from the turn of the last century, of whom I found two pictures in a book I used to own of Victorian photography. The pictures were far apart in the book, and not obviously related: one was of a bewitchingly pretty little girl of no more than about ten years old, the other of a mesmerisingly beautiful young woman in her late teens or early twenties. They were both remarkable pictures, and it was rather stunning to discover that they were of the same person, to realise that whatever it was that she had that made her so compelling, she'd had it since she was a child. I've lost that book long ago, and I've never been able to find those photographs, or anything about her online. But perhaps that's because I had misremembered her name. I suspect that it must have been the woman below, Lady Marjorie Manners. I still can't locate those photographs, though.

Nor on one of my earliest and most potent crushes (not quite as early as these two '60s sirens, but probably before I'd turned eight), Helga Anders, the young star of White Horses, a black-and-white German/Yugoslavian TV drama about a Lipizzaner stud farm which seemed to be on endless rotation on BBC children's television during the late '60s and early '70s. The insidiously pretty theme tune was probably the main key to its popularity. And I suppose this show really shouldn't have appealed to boys; but we're largely immune to peer pressure and macho stereotyping until we get to nine or ten, I think. As has often been noted, guys dig chicks with skills: the rapport 'Julia' enjoyed with her horses was most impressive (I would have liked to have been that horse coming to wake her up every morning!), and I still find this little scene from the opening credits of her riding across the fields on a white stallion rather exciting.

Well, I'll never do a post about any of these ladies - apart from this post, obviously.