Grace Kelly, Hedy Lamarr and Ava Gardner: the impossible canon of classic beauty

Grace Kelly, Lamarr and Ava Gardner: the goddesses the camera immortalized

Grace Kelly. No nuances. For the thread's author, the most beautiful classic film actress ever to grace a screen. At some distance, Hedy Lamarr. From there on, open war: the answer doesn't exist, there are two dozen frames that contradict it.

The review accumulates dozens of proposals and still hasn't closed. Audrey Hepburn enters and someone replies that she doesn't attract them in the least. Sophia Loren enters and it's settled with a «THE WOMAN». The canon isn't decided by majority. It's decided by each person's memory.

Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner and the rest of the saints

The names pile up without order. Ava Gardner in The Killers, spectacular in every scene. Rita Hayworth. Ingrid Bergman, whom someone claims in case she was forgotten. Lauren Bacall, with the nuance that she was also a stunner. Vivien Leigh. Gene Tierney. Kim Novak and her little dance in Picnic, unmatched. Elizabeth Taylor. And Maureen O'Hara, for whose spunk one participant would pay a truckload of Fantas.

The list stretches to the administrative. Barbara Stanwyck when young. Gloria Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life. Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil, with the cruel note that the daughter inherited her mother's body and her father's face. Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Tippi Hedren in The Birds, of whom it's said she wasn't extraordinarily beautiful but was a woman with whom to start a large family.

Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago, the most beautiful for some

Because some maintain that nothing so beautiful has ever been seen on a cinema screen as the young Julie Christie in that role, and the argument is repeated without anyone disputing it. Claudia Cardinale enters via classic beauty. And Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, bathing in the Trevi Fountain alongside Marcello Mastroianni, earns the label of carnal goddess, of a type of beauty with generous curves that, according to the writer, appealed to Italians and Latinos.

There the first serious sustancia ilegal in the exercise appears. That beauty, one notes, is largely magic of the camera and a good professional behind it. Reality, they argue, brings many down from the altar.

The halo effect: the actor you run into has more wrinkles

The explanation has a name. Halo effect. When one runs into an actor in daily life, one discovers they are smaller than expected and have more wrinkles. In the end, everyone more alike than we thought. Another intervention adds an observation that hurts: the passage of years makes those goddesses who turned heads invisible. Nature stole their beauty and, with it, the showcase.

The tone then turns elegiac, almost mournful, and that's where it's clearest what the conversation is really about: not actresses, but what fades. The list of names serves as an excuse to talk about a world that no longer exists.

Sara Montiel, Sydney Sweeney and the trap of comparing eras

Of the Spanish, Sara Montiel. When the name that appears is contemporary, some confess they had to Google it to know who it was, and conclude that she's pretty but doesn't measure up to Jane Fonda. The comparison between generations doesn't hold: makeup, film grain, lighting and expectations change.

At that point the matter derails. Two interventions maintain that the actress's genetics have been «extinguished» among her children and resort to hypergamy and generational complaint. Reducing a person's value to their ancestry is not an argument, it's prejudice, and this article will not go down that path. The conversation, which began with Grace Kelly, ends up talking about something else.

Elegance weighs more than cleavage

Not everyone accepts the drift. One intervention cuts the discussion and recalls the original purpose: it's not about being dazzled by bodies, but by beauty and elegance. The correction is pertinent. The names with which it closes—Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh, Lauren Bacall—point in that direction: women of profile, not just anatomy.

Will there be a winner? With these ingredients, no. The discussion will return every time someone watches Doctor Zhivago or North by Northwest on a Saturday afternoon, and it will return with the same names and the same arguments. At most, in twenty years the canon will have added one or two new faces and lost some. The camera, in the end, always wins.