a funny thing happened...
...on the way to the facial recognition software...
Alright so I caved, I admit it, to that whole 'find your celeb double & update your facebook profile pic' nonsense. But I learned a few things.
For one, that stupid myheritage website makes you install an add-on to do this-- which then tries to hijack your search & browser & takes some doing to uninstall. For another, that stupid software 'says' that when wearing glasses, I most look like an old man. o_0 I mean, like, Larry King. Seriously! WTF?! I'm a lot of things not right, people, but "manly looking" sure as hell ain't one of them. Moving on...
Eventually I discovered how to not get men as results and how to flip thru the results. A bunch of other people popped up who are so unknown to me, they may as well BE complete unknowns-- and no match was above 70% for me. According to them, Mena Suvari is a 60% match, but she didn't feel right to me. Finally, I found the face that felt familiar & right: Gene Tierney.
Old Hollywood. I liked that. Plus there was the inevitable Moonlight link: in the epi "Click" the character of Tierney Tate was named after Gene. Then I went exploring, and the Halflight links were stunning. ( Halflight is a Moonlight fic my friend is writing & in which I avatar a character.) Gene was a rich society girl, who spoke fluent French & went to finishing school in Switzerland. She was married to a fashion designer, Oleg Cassini. She inspired a novel, Agatha Christie's, Mirror Cracked from Side to Side. (My avatar, Ariel is a rich girl, French-Swiss, who loves fashion and inspired a character in her father's novel. ;-)
Other curious facts are that Gene "owned her look", and she did not let studio heads mess with her hair color, length or her overbite. She was friend's with Howard Hugues, as a resuls of his failed seduction attempts. Finally, for a little RL link, Gene starred in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
As a litte girl, I loved that movie, after I saw it on TV, one cold, winter Sunday afternoon. I just never knew she was Mrs. Muir, until today. I also never knew exactly why I loved it; much like it took me years to realize why I loved the Greek myth of Hades best of all. They're both rather dark, love stories. See, when a living suitor comes along for the widowed Mrs. Muir, the ghost leaves her in peace. But he's not what he seems, and so Mrs. Muir spends the rest of her life waiting for the ghost to return. They're reunited only after her death though, if memory serves. Now, I need this movie on DVD... and I'm sure I saw it recently too. (Was it part of a collection? Was that why I didn't get it? *shrugs*)
Those are all the positives, mostly. Apparently, poor Gene had one of the most unfortunate life stories. Her father funded her career, then stole money from her. She had terrible bouts of depression and mental illness. Her first child was born severely handicapped because a pregnant Gene was inffected with rubella by a crazed, ill fan.
"Gene is the luckiest, unlucky girl in the world, all of her dreams came true, at a cost." -Oleg Cassini.
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