RIP Bettie Page. Her legend will live on!

[Game Photography Edinburgh.]

Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup credited with helping to spark the next decade's sexual revolution, died in Los Angeles yesterday from pneumonia. She was 85. In honor of the passing of this treasure from a bygone era, an excerpt from EW critic Owen Gleiberman's review of the 2006 biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page:

"It has often been said that Bettie Page, the legendary '50s pinup with the pert features framed by those famously severe black bangs, was the rare American sex goddess who was equally at home projecting the image of a good girl or a bad girl. Frolicking, naked, in the ocean foam, her leg extended with playful pleasure, she was all dazzle and sunshine: the girl next door who said yes yes yes. In her scandalous underground bondage photos, where she posed as a dominatrix with a whip held high, or as a masochist with a ball in her mouth, she vamped like a pussycat from hell, her eyes narrowing with mean delight — or widening in mock terror. Yet the mysterious alchemy of Bettie Page isn't just that she could turn on a dime from light to dark, saint to sinner, virgin to vixen. It's that she was somehow able to project both qualities at once. In the bondage photos, so shocking for their time, her warm, spirited, peekaboo vibrance doesn't disappear; it's there just beneath the surface aggression of her poses. As for her all-American cheesecake shots, they have a quality of delirious, laughing abandon, as though she were winking at the she-devil inside. What Bettie Page conjured — always — was the promise of pleasure without limits. She was a one-woman orgy in centerfold form."

Good night, Bettie. Although it's a cliche, there really is no truer summation than to say, they just don't make 'em like they used to.

[Infamous Nina Nightshade]

She'll live on in us!