Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Flexible Venus 3: Olinka Hardiman



Amazingly, it's very nearly a year since we last posted one of our flexible Venuses.  Yesterday, S in Vancouver sent us a note suggesting this picture would make a suitable entry and we cannot disagree.  The legwarmers, tutu, ballet shoes and total absence of knickers make this a most appropriate picture for this slot!




This picture originates from the French Lui magazine from March 1979. The pictorial only contained one other ballet-themed picture which is this one.




After a bit of research we discovered that the lovely young lady is Olinka Hardiman, a model and actress active throughout the eighties.  Olinka's first role was as a murder victim in the US/German co-production of Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline, although her part was cut.




Strangely, given this inauspicious start, her next appearance, the following year, was in the starring role in Emmanuelle goes to Cannes (1980) a  film directed by Jean-Marie Pallardy.  This  had nothing to do with the original films but was one of numerous low budget rip-offs. Olinka plays Emmanuelle who is a stripper dreaming of an acting career. Produced in both hard-core and soft core versions, unlike many of the films of the time where different actors were used for the hard core material often inserted later on, Olinka did her own hard core scenes.  Olinka co-stars with French porn star and later director Gabrielle Pontello, who assumed the feminine alias of Gabriela Ponti for the films he shot for the German market. It was Pontello who got Olinka, then working as a model in Paris, into hard core films.


The girl on the cover isn't in the film!


Her next film, Six Swedes on Ibiza (1981) is, coincidentally, in Triple P's collection as it was sent him by his German friend B, who thought it would cheer us up during a period of horrible weather earlier in the year (which it did!).  Given that there are six Swedish girls (although none of the actresses are Swedish) Olinka's screen time is rather more limited.  




Olinka demonstrates how to ace a job interview in Six Swedes on Ibiza


She does do a brief striptease (which became quite a common performance in her subsequent films) before being taken doggy style during a job interview.  At least that's what we think it is: the dialogue is in German, which we don't speak, although lack of knowledge of the language is really no barrier to the appreciation of this particular film consisting, as it does, of a series of sex scenes with a bit of, nicely sunny, travelogue-type photography between these scenes.


What are we doing in this junk?


Her final scene is with the other five "Swedish" girls on, bizarrely, a Chinese Junk at sea where they all get involved in an orgy.  The film could obviously only afford one camera as it just pans from couple to couple at random.  Olinka is actually in a threesome with one of the other girls, who keeps her clothes on.




Many more hardcore films followed but then someone decided that she looked like Marilyn Monroe (which she didn't) and so she did a series of films with a Marilyn theme; much to her own annoyance as she wanted to be recognised for herself.  Still, it broke her into the US market




She also appeared in many European soft core magazines at the time.



Supersex magazine April 1986


She did many of the black and white Italian hardcore picture story magazines, such as Supersex, in the eighties too.  These were like comic strips but done with photos rather than artwork.




In both her film and magazine shoots her lovely smile was much in evidence, in contrast to today's dour porn stars.  The key to successful erotic film is to convey the sense that the participants are enjoying it, not just going through the motions for the pay cheque.  Olinka was certainly successful at this.





In many of her films she performs dance sequences (with or without striptease) and some of the athletic positions she attains make us wonder if she had any dance training.




Information on her is not that available although it seems she was born in 1960 which would have made her nineteen for her Lui appearance.  Most online sources say that she was born in the South of France although Olinka is a Czech name and one piece we read about her has her originating in Slovakia. 




Her last film was the US Postcards from Abroad (1991) alongside the likes of other European import Angela Baron and Hypatia Lee.  Later she lived in Amalfi in Italy and it has also been suggested that she ran a night club in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, which would give credence to the story that she was, in fact, Czechoslovakian.  French or Czech she was certainly flexible!

No comments:

Post a Comment