Sally Rand Sexy

She knew how to work both ostrich-feather fans and the nation’s media--who helped make Sally Rand a skinternational figure when the stripper appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 with her fan dance and a tribute to Lady Godiva. (That latter stunt got her arrested.) Sally didn’t invent the striptease, but she made it part of our culture--and continued to stalk the stage as she aged into a little old churchgoer. But it could’ve gone differently if the petite performer didn’t have a lisp that ended her film career with the advent of the talkies. Her stripteases are immortalized in clips, but Sally was also a skimpily clad regular in the early Biblical epics of legendary director Cecil B. DeMille. She goes uncredited in both The King of Kings (1927), as a sultry slave to Mary Magdalene, and The Sign of the Cross (1932), where her bod is shown to be exceptionally edible once she’s thrown to the alligators by Emperor Nero. The outspoken intellectual stripped her way off this mortal coil back in 1979, but her lusty legacy struts on toward a skintennial!