Grace Jones

Grace Jones was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1948, moved with her family to Syracuse, New York in 1965, and studied theatre at a community college there before modelling took over. New York came first, with Wilhelmina, then Paris and the couture houses, Yves Saint Laurent and Kenzo, then the covers of Elle and Vogue Hommes and sittings for Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Hans Feurer. By the middle of the 1970s she was among the most visible Black models in the world, and the reason was a look nobody else was offering: severe, sculptural, androgynous, well ahead of the conversation about gender presentation that it helped start.

The records came next, and then the films, and the films are the part people underrate. Jones was never asked to disappear into a character. She was cast for presence, and the directors who understood that got something no amount of training supplies. May Day in A View to a Kill is the clearest case, a henchwoman who is plainly the most dangerous person in the film, played with total physical conviction. Zula in Conan the Destroyer is built the same way.

The rest of the filmography is stranger than those two blockbusters suggest: an almost wordless vampire in Vamp, the oddities Straight to Hell and Siesta, and a broad comic turn in Boomerang as a fashion-world monster, which is the closest Jones has come to self-parody. She plays it with a completely straight face.