Dovima

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Dovima, photographed by Edgar de Evia in the 1950s for a fur advertisement

Dovima (born December 11, 1927 in New York City , New York , † May 3, 1990 in Fort Lauderdale , Florida ; actually Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba ) was an American model . In the 1950s , along with Lisa Fonssagrives , Sonny Harnett , Dorian Leigh , Suzy Parker and Jean Patchett, she was one of the best-known and best-paid female models.

Life

Childhood and discovery as a photo model

Dovima, of Irish - Polish descent, was born Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba in New York in 1927 (1926 according to other sources) and grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens , New York . The daughter of Peggy and Stanley Juba, a Manhattan cop , suffered from rheumatic fever at the age of ten and was cared for by her mother for the next several years. Doe , as she was called by her family, began painting while bedridden and communicated with other ailing children over the phone. At that time she invented an imaginary friend named Dovima , a play on words made up of the first two letters of her three first names, which she would later use as a stage name. Her later first husband Jack Golden lived as a neighbor in the same house as her. Pale and clumsy as she was, she never considered herself a beautiful woman, as she later reported.

In 1949, the clerk of a candy store was leaving a Manhattan vending machine restaurant by an employee of the fashion magazine Vogue , who asked if she had ever worked as a model. She was then invited to test shots and a day later she was photographed by the well-known photographer Irving Penn . Dovima, as she called herself from now on, always closed her mouth while working with Penn because she had been missing a piece of a front tooth since childhood. But it was precisely this fact that made the recordings seem so mysterious and why her smile was compared to that of the Mona Lisa . After just a year of working as a photo model, Dovima became one of the most successful models of the Ford agency with a fee of 30 US dollars per hour. Later, the earnings of the American, who was celebrated as a symbol of over-cultivation, even doubled. Dovima worked with all the major photographers in the 1950s and appeared on the front pages of all major fashion magazines five hundred times. She worked closely with the photographer Richard Avedon , who looked back on her as one of the last great, elegant, aristocratic beauties. With Avedon, she took her best-known photo, "Dovima with the Elephants", for Harper's Bazaar in August 1955 . The picture was taken in the Paris Cirque d'hiver and shows the fragile-looking Dovima between two circus elephants, wearing a black robe with a white sash by Dior , the first evening dress designed by the then unknown assistant Yves Saint Laurent . Copies of the painting are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

End of the modeling career

In 1957, 1.73 m tall Dovima celebrated her debut as an actress with the part of the underexposed photo model Marion in Stanley Donen's A Sweet Face . The film, which was nominated four times for an Oscar in 1958 , is loosely based on the life of Richard Avedon and tells the story of a successful fashion photographer (played by Fred Astaire ) who falls in love with a young bookseller ( Audrey Hepburn ) in search of a new type of woman . Almost five years later, Dovima left the modeling business in 1962 at the age of 35 on the grounds that she did not want to wait for the camera to turn cruelly against her. While she later ran her own modeling agency, the London-based “young junior look” with Jean Shrimpton , Twiggy and Penelope Tree established itself as their best-known representatives.

Dovima was married three times. She divorced Jack Golden in the late 1950s. From 1957 she was married to Allan Murray, to whom she, like her husband before, entrusted the administration of all her finances. The bond that gave birth to their daughter Allison was violent and broke up in the 1960s when Dovima moved to Los Angeles to establish himself as an actress. During this time, she lost custody of her daughter to her ex-husband and a career in Hollywood failed when she couldn't get beyond appearances in television games such as the Kraft Suspense Theater and the series The Man from UNCLE (both 1964). In 1974 Dovima moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to be close to her parents, who had retired there. Here she made a living doing odd jobs like selling cosmetics and a job as a hostess at the local pizzeria The Two Guys, which she also served as the mascot for a softball team. In 1983 she married, for the third time, the bartender West Hollingsworth, who died of cancer in 1986. Dovima did not recover from this loss. In 1990 she died of liver cancer at the age of 62 .

Web links

Commons : Dovima  - collection of images

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c d e f cf. Bernadine Morris: "Dovima, a shelf model of the 50's, Is Dead at 63" , The New York Times , May 5, 1990, p 31
  2. ↑ a b c d cf. Weatherby, WJ: Obituary of Dovima: Elegant with elephants. In: The Guardian (London), May 19, 1990
  3. ↑ cf. Deaths. In: The Washington Post , May 6, 1990, Metro, pp. D13, Obituaries
  4. ↑ a b cf. Dovima Hollingsworth, The Associated Press , May 5, 1990, Domestic News, PM cycle
personal data
SURNAME Dovima
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Juba, Dorothy Virginia Margaret (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American model
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York , United States
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 1990
Place of death Fort Lauderdale , Florida , United States