Mae West once said to interviewer Charlotte Chandler that she first fell in love at the age of five-years, in the Royal Theater in Brooklyn: "It was my first love affair with the viewers, and it's lasted my life. That has been the only one that ever actually counted. No man could equal that. That ached for this, the spotlight that has been like the strongest man's arms about me, like an ermine coat."

Together with her unapologetic appeal - she when served moments in jail for having written the thriving stage show Sex - Mae West got blatant ranch to attractive Hollywood. The 1920s and 1930s equal to Madonna, West maintains on wearing salacious outfits that pushed in the censors' limitations. It worked for her, too: West had been 38 as she signed an agreement with Paramount; however the first film, in which she played a role, 1933's She Done Him Wrong, was such a hit it saved the studio from bankruptcy.

West notably dsappeared from Hollywood for almost thirty years right after Columbia Pictures' The Heat's On failed miserably. She tried a comeback in Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge in 1970, nevertheless the movie, which starred Raquel Welch as a woman who had been born a male, bombed. Her final film, Sextette, seemed to be a big disappointment.

Mae West may possibly have risen eyebrows with her costuming, but she truly revealed far less skin compared to sexpots of today. West's sex appeal was certainly about her body, but it was more about her passionate insistence that was an important and healthy facet of women's lives. Wear what you feel confidently.