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!

Flexible Venus 2: Kristine Winder

We have had quite a few messages of appreciation regarding our ballet dancer post so, encouraged by S in Vancouver, we will be putting more of these ladies up over the next few weeks.

In fact we had a Skype video call from S only two nights ago where she had put on a blue leotard and legwarmers and gave us an impressive stretch routine across cyberspace. She had drunk nearly a bottle of Quail's Gate Dry Reisling earlier so was particularly flexible.  Most diverting!

So what more appropriate subject for our next dancer than the lovely Kristine Winder from Vancouver who appeared as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in October 1977.

Her original pictorial contained four ballet pictures but we have tracked down some more including some different shots which appeared in French Playboy.

Kristine had spent seventeen years doing up to five hours dance training a day but given the then lack of artistic opportunity in the British Columbia city (it's still a bit light on classical arts compared with Toronto and Montreal - the Vancouver Art Gallery collection is pitiful, for example) she ended up as a receptionist.

She still looked nicely limber when she posed, at the age of 21, for the magazine. It's not possible to find out who took these dance photos as her pictorial had no less than four photographers: Mario Casilli (centrefold), Arny Freytag, Ken Honey and Ken Marcus.

The whole sequence is really a paean to the erotic charge of legwarmers, which work visually for exactly the same reason as stockings do but have the extra tactile quality of ribbed wool.

At 5'6" Kristine would have been rather tall for a ballerina and her 34-24-34 figure would have been rather curvier than the norm but Triple P thinks she had perfect proportions and looks superb in these pictures.

Legwarmers can have a truncating effect on the limbs but Kristine had such long legs that she still manages to look elegant in hers.

Usually Playboy used their Playmates' real names but Kristine Winder is a pseudonym as she didn't want her father to find out she had posed for the magazine. Unfortunately he did, as a number of crank, heavy breathing calls were made to people called Winder in Vancouver, trying to seek her out, and the press got hold of the story.

Sadly, Playboy reported in this year's June edition that Kristine had died earlier this year at the comparatively young age of 57.  We are happy to celebrate her loveliness and dance-schooled elegance here.

Flexible Venus 1: Dancer in a lilac tutu

Agent Triple P would never claim to be an aficionado of ballet, although he has attended a fair few in the company of ballet-loving ladies.  We have seen ballet in London, Berlin, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Vienna, Toronto, Hanoi and probably a few other places we have forgotten about.

Whilst Triple P can understand the appeal of ballet he remembers being rather surprised, on attending his first performance, at the amount of noise the dancers made when thumping hard on to the stage.  It took something away from the experience, which is why we think it works better on TV where you just get the music and no thumping!

Although we haven't gone out with any dancers per se we have known  some who have had dance training (quite a lot in several cases) and the thought of dancers has always held a certain erotic frisson for Triple P.  There are four things Triple P finds particularly alluring about dancers: the toned legs and slender figures (we appreciate a skinny girl),  the clothing, the physical poise and, last but by no means least, the demonstrable flexibility.

One girl we knew did regular jazz and tap classes to keep in shape and her legs, although pleasingly soft to the touch had this iron tone beneath the surface like silk riding over tungsten carbide.  Stroking her legs was a true pleasure, especially when she flexed her muscles and you could feel her underlying strength.

There are two attractive aspects of dance dress.  Firstly, the performance wear, which for classical ballet features that strangely attractive garment the tutu. This Russian dancer is wearing a fetching lilac example of the now almost ubiquitous Balanchine/Karinska Tutu whose softer profile was, nevertheless, radical when it first appeared in 1950 as an alternative to the stiffer wired "pancake" tutu.  The success of the tutu, which on reflection is, of course, an utterly ridiculous garment, relies on the emphasis it gives to the dancer's legs.

Dance practice wear tends to be an artfully created melange of all sorts of contrasting pieces of clothing which, nevertheless, needs to allow full movement whilst keeping the legs warm.  One of Triple P's lady friends had got the wearing of legwarmers, skirts, vests, short cardigans and scarfs down to a fine art.  There were so many items of clothing but all so skimpy that they barely made a costume in total.  Which, of course, is the real trick.

Properly trained dancers are usually easy to identify by the way they move, hold their bodies and even the way they stand. Girls who habitually stand with their feet in a "T" position have probably had a lot of ballet training.  Triple P finds this almost unconscious elegance very appealing.

This young lady has had classical training as she is able to go en pointe a technique which requires literally years of practice starting at the barre and great muscular strength (and not just in the legs).

Although the idea is to extend the line of the leg and make the feet look elegant in reality most ballet dancers have terrible feet; the rigours of going en pointe giving them calluses, bleeding toenails, bunions, bursitis and many other nasty ailments.  You have to suffer for art!

This sequence of pictures was recently sent to us by our particular friend S with whom we have been to several ballets in Canada.  A young lady who did a lot of ballet as a youngster she well knows the effort needed to look effortless!

Triple P confesses that every time he sees an attractive ballerina in a tutu his mind always turns to exciting thoughts of flexibility and minimal ballet clothes so this set of photos is most welcome!

Female dancers' flexibility is their most obvious source of erotic appeal, as our Russian girl exemplifies in this final splendid study, but we will look at flexibility and the erotic shortly.