Rant #2,309: Blonde Ambition

Yesterday, it was reported that Louisa Moritz had passed away.

She was just 72 years old, and died of heart failure.

If you don't know who she was, I could tell you that she was one of the Hollywood personalities who recently accused Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them decades ago.

And I could leave it at that.

But there was so much more about Louisa Moritz that I would be leaving out, and that would be criminal.

During the late 1960s through to pretty much the mid-1980s, Moritz was one of the most visible, head-scratching, eye candy personalities in show business, appearing in dozens and dozens of TV shows. movies and commercials, but I don't think too many people knew her name.

Whether appearing in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" with Jack Nicholson or in a commercial promoting underarm deodorant or on "The Joe Namath Show," this lady was everywhere during her peak time, and she used her voluptuous figure and baby-soft voice to make quite a name for herself, even though viewers of her work probably didn't know who she was.

Moritz was probably the first modern day sex symbol to not hide her Hispanic background--as Rita Hayworth and Raquel Welch did--and, in fact, play off of that background to a comedic hilt.

Moritz was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1946 as Luisa Castro, and as political upheaval enveloped the country, she ended up leaving there in the late 1950s and early 1960s, coming to New York and looking for fame and stardom.

She changed her name from Castro to Moritz so there would be no link with the Cuban dictator, who she was not related to family wise, dyed her hair blonde, and as they say, away she went. And by the way, legend has it that she named herself after the Saintz Moritz Hotel in Manhattan.

She made her way to Hollywood, and she ended up being one of the last of the "it" girls in movies and TV. Whenever a sexy lady was needed for a walk on or just to dress up a scene, Moritz was often the choice to do just that.

On "The Joe Namath Show," when the macho Namath and his equally macho guests would be talking sports and shooting the breeze, Moritz would walk into the situation wearing high heels, a skin tight dress, bringing her trademark figure and blonde locks with her.

She would completely interrupt the scene to tell Namath something, or hand him something, and honestly, it was worth the price of admission just to see her do this, totally upstaging Namath and his guests although her walk on might last just a minute or two.

But Moritz was well more than that. She went to law school in between acting gigs, earned her law degree, and actually was an attorney through the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s. In 2017, her law license was suspended for numerous, unnamed violations.

Through her spot TV and movie work, she was able to eventually buy her own hotel, which she named after the original Saint Moritz Hotel that so impressed her early on that she changed her name to celebrate it.

And when her celebrity faded, she came into the news again as one of the original seven women who accused comic Cosby of sexual impropriety, a case that her agent said will continue even though Moritz has passed on.

Moritz was married for a brief time, had a child before her marriage, but little is known of her offspring, as he was raised by relatives when Moritz went to Hollywood.

So that was, in a nutshell, the life of Louisa Moritz, whose voice and figure you probably knew way back when, but whose name probably escaped you.

Personally, in movies and TV shows and commercials that I watched growing up, she was a ubiquitous presence, always there, always there briefly, but even in her small parts and scenes, she was someone you never forgot.

R.I.P.