Julie Newmar

Pencil Portrait by Antonio Bosano.

Julie Newmar Pencil Portrait
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The quality of the prints are at a much higher level compared to the image shown on the left.

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A3 Pencil Print-Price £45.00-Purchase

A4 Pencil Print-Price £30.00-Purchase

*Limited edition run of 250 prints only*

All Pencil Prints are printed on the finest Bockingford Somerset Velvet 255 gsm paper.

P&P is not included in the above prices.

Comments

Last update : 4/5/15

I was in love with Julie Newmar before I was even interested in girls!

Impossibly gorgeous, curvaceous in a true hourglass fashion and statuesque to boot, her appearances as catwoman in the hit Tv series “Batman,” seemed the perfect advertisement for crime. I could just about take the cape crusader’s weekly proselytizing, but there was a distinct hollow ring to it when handing over his feline adversary to the authorities. Personally, I would have robbed the Bank of England for her.

Today at 81, she still carries the hallmarks of a lithe dancer, an exacting profession in which she first learned her craft.

Her father was a college lecturer and her mother a former Ziegfeld dancer. She was born Julia Chalene Newmar on 16 August 1933 in Los Angeles, California, and from an early age would studympiano, dance and classical ballet.

A lifelong student of ballet, Newmar was accepted as a dancer by the Los Angeles Opera Company at age 15, and soon became prima ballerina. In the early 1950s, she was engaged to novelist Louis L’Amour but they split before they got married.

Always intelligent, she studied philosophy and French at UCLA, before leaving to try her luck in films. A stint as a gold-painted exotic dancer in Serpent of the Nile (1954) was usually overlooked by Newmar’s biographers, who preferred to list Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, in 1954, as her screen debut.

She then featured in the Broadway musicals ‘Can-Can’, and ‘Li’l Abner’, but it was in ‘The Marriage-Go-Round’ that the actress attained true stardom – and also won a Tony Award.

Recreating her stage roles for the film versions of Li’l Abner and Marriage-Go-Round (1961), Newmar spent the next few years dividing her time between stage work and TV guest spots. She was cast as a beautiful robot on the TV sitcom My Living Doll’, but the series was unsuccessful.

Her best remembered role is as Catwoman, on the weekly series Batman between 1966 and 1967. The role seemed made for her, but contractual commitments kept her from appearing in the feature film version; a fact that broke my heart when I was taken to see the film for my eighth birthday!!!.

Newmar’s film career peaked with MacKenna’s Gold (1968) and The Maltese Bippy (1969), after which she was consigned to such deathless projects as Hysterical and Ghosts Can’t Do It in 1989.

On 5 August 1977, she married lawyer J Holt Smith and moved with him to Fort Worth in Texas. She had one son with Holt called John Jewl Smith and he was born with Downs Syndrome and was deaf. She divorced Holt in 1984.

Julie still enjoys the occasional film or TV role that interests her. In recent years, she has acted in Nudity Required (1990), King B: A Life In Movies (1993), Oblivion (1994), Oblivion 2: Backlash (1996), as Catwoman in ‘Maggie’ (1998), If … Dog … Rabbit (1999), TV series According to Jim (2006) and Batman: The Brave and the Bold voicing Martha Wayne in 2010.

She is a favourite model for designer Thierry Mugler, and she still dances ballet. She also makes appearances as the original Catwoman. She is also an astute business entrepreneur receiving two patents in the 1970s for pantyhose and a brassiere, with the latter being described as having cheeky derriere relief and the former as being inspired by Marilyn Monroe. Since the 1980s, she has also been investing in Los Angeles property.

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Julie Newmar

http://julienewmar.com/

Photos and musings from Julie on health, humour, age, politics, the arts and life.