Sometimes a photograph is enough.

It started with the wonderful – and costly! – reprints of Milton Caniff‘s Terry & the Pirates strips.
A classic of exotic adventure, a masterpiece of comic art.
Considering the extravagant price tags observed in the local “friendly” comicbooks store, I was thrawling through the web looking for cheaper deals.

The web being what it is, I soon found the Columbia Terry & the Pirates serial from 1940 – which is available in streaming through YouTube.

And in the movie serial Terry, there’s the Dragon Lady.
And she looks like this.

As I said, a photograph is often enough.

The woman that played the Dragon lady in the 1940 serial of Terry & the Pirates was Sheila Darcy, aka Sheila D’arcy, aka Sheila Wassem.
Her real name was Rebecca Benedict Heffner.
She came from Pennsylvania.
And she was gorgeous.

So I looked around a bit to learn more about her and found out the gorgeous miss Darcy was a B movie regular in the second half of the ’30s.
She was sort of specialized in playing exotic beauties – Chinese (like Dragon Lady), Spanish (as in Zorro’s Fighting Legion) and then Gypsies, Native Americans, and so on.
She worked in serials, and in a lot of westerns.
In less than ten years she was in something like 50 movies – she shot eight movies in 1941 alone.

Sheila Darcy is not particularly famous – she is known for her role as Dragon Lady, and for the many westerns in her CV.
She had a beautiful face, and one that could be easily altered by makeup – an asset, in B movies and serials.

There’s also this story going around, that she did so many uncredited roles wearing ethnic make-up, that there’s an unknown number of movies out there in which this delectable beauty appears in a small part, and we don’t know about it.
Certainly, the photos posted here show how ductile was her beauty.

Sheila Darcy was a beautiful lady – and I thought I’ll make a small post about her.
Because beauty must be celebrated.