Betty Grable
Sexy

The original pin-up girl, Betty Grable was nudged into show business by her manipulative stage mother at the age of thirteen. After ten years of bit parts and failures, Betty finally got a break with her role in Down Argentine Way (1940). The 1940s saw Betty’s star rise as high as her bust line with musicals like Coney Island (1943) and Sweet Rosie O’Grady (1943), and the success of her ubiquitous bathing-suit photos, which became favorites of American GIs in World War II, made her the highest-paid star in Hollywood in 1947. She stopped making films in 1955 and turned her attention to Broadway and the nightclub circuit. Though we never saw Betty’s bazooms, her long legs and curvy figure made her a standard of sexiness for her era and for the hundreds of would-be pin-up girls who clog up the Sunset Strip today.