"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Monday, January 31, 2011

Girl Monday - Veronica Lake

Preston Sturges was one of the great comedy directors of the 1930s and 1940s, and his best movie perhaps was Sullivan's Travels, with Joel McRea and Veronica Lake, our girl of the day.   Veronica Lake had a sad life, with problems with alcoholism and mental illness -- she was reputed to be so difficult to work with that McRea later turned down a role because, as he said, "life is too short for two movies with Veronica Lake" --and she died of hepatitis at age 51, which, since it is my current age, seems entirely too young.   When she was in her early twenties in the 1940s and first making it big in Hollywood, however, she was strikingly beautiful, with perhaps the most recognizable hairdo in movie history, her bangs flipping down over one eye.

Tempus fugit.    

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