Marlene Dietrich: Smoking Queen
One of the most sensuous smokers from the classic black and white movie days was definitely Marlene Dietrich. Now, she is way before the time of most of you who will be reading this blog, even though she lived well into her 80's.
She was in the silent movie era, and worked with such screen legends as Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart. For me, a biography of her that I saw in the public library (where people used to do their reading before the 'net, youngsters) was oone of the first times I can remember being aroused by the sight of a woman with a cigarette, I think from a movie called The Blue Angel .
I also remember seeing an old movie of hers-I'm not sure of the titile guys-where she is smoking almost an entire cigarette hands free while sweeping a floor. In retrospect, that scene had to be done with an attraction to smoking glamour.
She was no doubt in real life, as almost all of those classic smoking queens of the silver screen were...hell, it was her generation of actresses smoking in the movies that helped turn smoking from an almost entirely male activity in the first part of the twentieth century to a majority female one by the end of the century, so we should all kind of expect to see smoking when we watch those old black and white films with their flickering images, although the lighting of the smoke will not compare to what we can see on the web today with producers focusing on just that.
But, to the point, there is not even a question that Marlene Dietrich, the German actress who turned her back on Hitler for Hollywood, was one of the very best of the smoking queens.
