Goodnight, classy lady.
It's a dark day in skindom, as the statuesque Jill Clayburgh passed away Friday at the age of 66 after fighting leukemia for a staggering two decades.
Known for her "liberated woman" roles in '70s flicks, Jill had a small but mamorable role in The Wedding Party, and costarred in the big screen adaptation of Portnoy's Complaint.
She was a fixture on the boob tube before she broke out--of her clothes, mind you--in An Unmarried Woman in 1978. As a divorce on the loose in the era of women's lib, Jill liberated herself from her shirt for the very first time in her career. When she whipped out her charming, natural, beanbag-sized breasts, a skin star was born.
Jill became the go-to thesp for movies involving independent women, and a year after Unmarried, she outdid herself in La Luna, stripping out of her exercise gear to bare lumps, rump, and the single fluffiest side-muff ever committed to celluloid. That is one voluminous furburgh, Clayburgh!
More nudity followed in Starting Over (1979), earning her nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, and Jill gave back by flaunting her own glorious little globes in It's My Turn (1980) and I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982).
She was stripping as fast as she could, but sadly, that was her last nude role. She did non-naked but wonderful work for the rest of her life, and her very last completed film was Love and Other Drugs (2010), the soon-to-be-released flick featuring gobs of bare flesh from Anne Hathaway. A fitting send-off for skin legend Jill, who will never be fur-gotten.
