I grew up in a cloud of second-hand smoke in the 1950s when it seemed like everybody smoked — my parents, their friends, actors in movies and on TV — everybody. Smoking bans were years in the future. Health concerns about smoking got little if any attention. Cigarettes were props, a way of shaping an image. For actors and actresses, being photographed holding a cigarette or having one hanging out of the mouth could add a sense of glamor, sexiness, or mystery, both onscreen and off. I think that’s at work in many of these photos, though in the more candid shots the person just happens to be smoking, because that’s what they did.
Some shots are candid, others obviously posed. And some are just really great photographs.
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Jean-Paul Belmondo, Lee Van Cleef, Akira Kurosawa. Some serious smoke.
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Toshiro Mifune
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Brigitte Bardot
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John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
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Anna Karina, Maggie Cheung, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich
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Peter O’Toole, Paul Newman
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Director Claude Chabrol looking pretty goofy. Photo by Jean Loup Sieff, 1959.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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Luis Buñuel
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Kurosawa again
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Jeanne Moreau
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Sophia Loren
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Susan Sarandon
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Director James Whale and Boris Karloff taking a smoke break while making Frankenstein (1931).
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Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the Monster gets hooked.
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This PSA aired in February 1986, four months after Yul Brynner’s death from lung cancer.
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Robert Ryan to take us out. I think I’ve used this shot before, but I love it so much, had to use it again.
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That’s all for this one. See you next time. — Ted Hicks
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