Mae West: Lillian Russell

Much admired by both MAE WEST and her mother was the actress Lillian Russell.
• • Millionaire "Diamond Jim" Brady was another devotee.
• • Lillian Russell [born Helen Louise Leonard in Iowa in December 1860] is in our thoughts during the month of June because the influential beauty died at age 61 on 6 June 1922.
• • Referring to the Victorian idol (and ideal example of womanhood) that Russell had become, Emily Wortis Leider writes: "Matilda [West] herself, a soft-spoken native of Bavaria whose stunning hourglass figure reminded people of the ripe and rounded opulence of reigning New York beauty, actress Lillian Russell, had married after a brief stint modeling corsets, a scant seven years after her arrival in America. She had once harbored hopes for a stage career of her own, but her respectable merchant family, kin to proprietors of a New York brewery renowned for its lager, forbade it. They probably had also discouraged her forays into the corset-modeling profession, which she glamorized with a French word, modiste. ..."
• • Leider's book "Becoming Mae West" is a well-researched and engrossing biography.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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