A brazen, curvaceous bombshell of the otherwise square Atomic Age, Anne Francis is the archetypal mid-20th century fox. Blonde and curvy, with a sweet little mole atop her lip, Anne made for a perfect ingénue in Hollywood potboilers such as Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and Blackboard Jungle (1955). As immortalized in The Rocky Horror Picture Show's opening theme, Anne scorched the sci-fi universe as an outta-this-world sex bomb in Forbidden Planet (1956), in which she bared her milky-white back while skinny dipping and provided some surreptitious sideboob. (Thank you, modern technology, for the pause button!) Nonetheless, this alluring adventure babe is best remembered for the way she filled up the small screen as TV’s private eyeful on the series Honey West. Although the action show ran from only 1965 to 1966, Anne’s trademark combination of kinky karate stomping and painted-on glamor-gal get-ups supplied Honey with enough potent punch to make the character a cult icon and a diddler’s delight that has spanned the decades. Sweetly, Anne's character Honey West was the first female detective to lend her name to a TV series. Anne earned a Golden Globe for that role, but for the rest of her career, which included stops on The Fugitive and Mission: Impossible, we never got to see her complete golden globes. Of course, it was a different time: a flash of sideboob in 1956 is worth roughly a full-frontal today! Ms. Francis passed away in 2011, but we can still watch Forbidden Planet to get a look at her forbidden orbs.
