Sunday 25 September 2016

My legs are my fortune









"Gossip doesn't worry me - I'm an open person. I've mixed around in this business long enough not to be embarrassed by anything pertaining to sex."

"My really big disappointment was being told I was too tall for the ballet. When I got on my toes, some of those male partners were way down there."


Miss Juliet Prowse - star of the high-kicking movie Can-Can, as well as innumerable television variety shows and Vegas-style spectaculars, would have been eighty years old today.

Facts:
  • Miss Prowse was the very first guest star on The Muppet Show.
  • She had affairs with both Frank Sinatra (to whom she was briefly engaged) and Elvis Presley - at the same time.
  • Born in Bombay, India, her British family relocated to South Africa when she was 3; it was here, as a teenager, that she became a championship dancer.
  • In 1987 she was mauled - twice - by an 80-pound leopard while rehearsing for television shows; afterwards she restricted such appearances in future to animals "no bigger than an alley cat."
  • Her brother is Dave Prowse, who played "Darth Vader" in Star Wars and was the "Green Cross Code Man" in children's safety campaign TV ads in the 1970s.
Juliet Anne Prowse (25th September 1936 – 14th September 1996)

More of the delightful Miss Prowse here and here.

12 comments:

  1. I DID NOT know all this! thank you for the education, dolores!

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  2. She also had her own television series as a big time, capital-S Star married to some schmoe who wanted her to be just a little housewifey. Very 60s

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    1. But could she afford wrinkles round her ankles? Jx

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  3. I didn't know Dave Prowse was her brother. He is rather tall too

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    1. Not sure he ever modelled "Leggs pantyhose", however. Jx

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    2. He could have gotten away with green tights though.
      Sx

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  4. Memories. I remember when she used to host the Ballroom Dancing competitions when they were televised. Five or six couples competing in extravagant outfits doing waltzes, tangos and the like. She being famous for her dancing prowess was a most entertaining moderator. I was shocked by her early death. I'm racking my brain trying to remember who took over her duties.
    I'm thinking Dorothy Provine may have proceeded her and maybe Marylu Henner at some later point but I may be wrong in both instances. That was a long time ago. I'm wondering if they even have these ballroom dancing competitions anymore. The outfits were incredible. You would have loved them!

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    1. The BBC has a long history of such televised ballroom dancing competitions - Come Dancing ran from 1949 (with professional dancers Syd Perkin and Edna Duffield - just imagine the fun they must have had trying to describe the colours of the frocks before colour telly came in in the late '60s) right through to 1998! I remember it well. Its successor "Strictly" Come Dancing is merely a Z-list "celebrity" vehicle with a baying audience and "knockout rounds"; in the US I believe it's called Dancing With The Stars. I never watch that.

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    2. I never watch DWTS either, for me it has no appeal. It's just not the same experience as the old time dance professionals.

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    3. I often wish they'd just resurrect the original, "amateur" programme. Trouble is, how many actual ballroom dancers are left out there, who would be available to feature in such a programme nowadays? It would end up being just as shrill, vacuous and soul-destroying as its so-called celeb counterpart, as attention-seeking chavs line up for ritual humiliation (a la X-Factor and its ilk). Jx

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