You may not recognize her because the old Yugoslav magazine Filmski Svet, aka Film World was a little heavy handed with the retouching, but the crimson clad figure below is Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko. You’re thinking, “Nata Zaka who?” Well, maybe you know her better as Natalie Wood, the great American actress of Russian descent who was born in California. Filmski Svet has made her into a mannequin, but we still find this a striking cover. It appeared in September 1964.

That’s Sylva Koscina on a June 1969 cover of Filmski Svet, aka Movie World, from the former Yugoslavia. The photo would be what publicists call a “handout”, which is simply an image given upon request to a publication planning a story or photo essay on a certain celeb. All the second tier publications are given handout photos, and similar images from the same photographic series will often appear in other publications. Obviously, second-tier magazines prefer to look as though celeb photos were taken just for them, so in this case Filmski Svet cleverly solved that problem by superimposing Koscina onto a new background and reversing the negative (notice how her pinky ring changes hands?). Once we figured that out, we were able to locate another couple of shots from the same session. It’s hard work, all this sleuthing, but if we don’t do it, who will?

Tunisian/Italian actress Claudia Cardinale on the cover of the Yugoslavian movie magazine Filmski Svet, 1967. 

Above is American star James Dean on the cover of two issues of Filmski Svet, aka Movie World, from the former Yugoslavia. Dean’s unexpected death still ranks as one of the most shocking in Hollywood history. In September 1955 he was driving his convertible Porsche 550 Spyder on U.S. Route 466 when a sedan in an oncoming lane turned in front of him and struck his small sports car head-on. Dean was alive when he was loaded into an ambulance, but was pronounced DOA at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital, aged twenty-four. Both of the above covers were published posthumously in 1967 (top) and 1957.