Kelly Le Brock had limited acting talents but was one of those classic 80s pin-up who became the stuff of schoolboy fantasies.  

LeBrock started out as a model. (She was the Pantene girl who memorably implored  “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” in a famous TV commercial).  As an actress, she is remembered for essentially her first two movies – The Woman In Red and Weird Science, before she disappeared from view. 

Neither of these is what one would call a great movie, but LeBrock is the best thing in them. She makes a memorable screen entrance in Woman In Red with a recreation of the famous “skirt being blown upwards through a ventilation grate” scene which Marilyn Monroe famously originated in The Seven Year Itch. 

I remember the movie being slightly creepy in that star/director/writer Gene Wilder spends the entire movie fantasising about being unfaithful with LeBrock’s character and comes unpleasantly close to doing the deed before fate intervenes. 

The Woman In Red actually won an Oscar – for Best Original Song (Stevie Wonder’s love-it-or-hate-it mega-hit “I just called to say I loved you”). There were no Oscars for LeBrock’s next film, Weird Science, but it has since become something of a cult classic. It is one of the lesser movies directed by teen movie specialist John Hughes (The Breakfast Club etc). LeBrock (typecast already) again plays the fantasy woman – this time literally dreamed up out of a computer by two high-school nerds.

After Weird Science, LeBrock didn’t make another movie for 5 years, although she did go on to marry Steven Seagal (but we will gloss over that…)