Elizabeth Hartman

Don't know why, but I just thought of the actress Elizabeth Hartman this afternoon. She was probably most famous for A Patch of Blue, with Sidney Poitier. She also starred in You're a Big Boy Now, which came out in 1966. I saw the latter movie when I was 12 and it, or at least she, made a big impression on me. I remember her as being just unbearably attractive.

It's always interesting to go back and look at pictures of women you thought were beautiful when you were very young and have that opinion confirmed 40-odd years later. I look at these pictures now --

-- and think, ah yes, those features really were perfect. I look at the eyes, the mouth, the cheekbones, the chin, the nose, and see they were all just right. When I was younger, especially at age 12, I wouldn't have analyzed it this way. Back then I just drank in the overall picture and was floored.

When you analyze the features one by one, a little bit of the magic gets lost. I feel it, just not the same way I did at 12. But I still think: boy was she ever beautiful.

Which I guess is really the only point of this post.

Hartman suffered from depression her entire life, and committed suicide in 1987, at age 43.

She must have had an awful lot of people say to her, "What are you so depressed about? You're so beautiful! I'm the one who should be depressed."

But that's not the way depression works.

Here's a clip from You're a Big Boy Now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9tNZDM-LMw&feature=related