It’s that time of year when we watch White Christmas and can’t take our eyes off Vera-Ellen’s impossibly tiny waist. Beautiful woman, great dancer.
Yes! I am distracted by how creepily small it is when I try to watch this movie.
Her legs are so muscular that the contrast is extra creepy.
Forget her waist – what about her freakin’ neck?
Well how do you expect her to eat, She’s got no forearms or hands.
Is that true? Did she have anorexia nervosa? (Or another type of anorexia?) While I’m aware that every body type is seen with the disease, she really looks well muscled, well hydrated and marbled with fat in all the right places in those pictures, and she was a strong dancer - her waist is small because she waist trained with a corset, not because she was underweight or wasting.
This Movie Urban Legends site discusses her probable anorexia and her neck coverings. There’s no good evidence she had anything wrong with her neck for long periods and there are many pictures of her barenecked.
She was naturally skinny and had a skinny mother and grandmother from other things I read. And dancers have fantastically toned bodies. She was 5’4" and probably under 100 pounds, maybe under 90 for some of her career. She might have corset-trained, too, or they could have just forced her into one for shooting.
And she’s got plumes growing out of her stumps.
Bless her, reading her Wikipedia page shows that she went through quite a lot. She was married and divorced twice and her only child died at the age of 3 months. 
She died of cancer, not anorexia.
She has a very small frame and is slender. I think anorexic is an urban legend. An anorexic would not have had the energy to pull off those dance routines and the rehearsal times the old studio sytem required. It was slavery with hair, makeup and wardrobe.
In fairness, that quote didn’t assert that she starved herself “to death,” only that she starved herself. The anorexia hypothesis is controversial.
That website can’t even agree on her waist size (was it 17 inches or 16 inches or 21 inches?).
She doesn’t look anorexic. Her face is plump-cheeked, not sunken. Her legs are firm and full, not scrawny. Her chest doesn’t look all bones and shoulders.
I agree, she’s likely corset-trained.
And google turns up several pictures with her neck visible. No signs of scars or other problems. It just looks like style choice to me.
To me she looks healthy. Her waist doesn’t even look that small considering that she appears to be in a corset for many of those photos. Certainly not “impossibly tiny”- but then, I could corset into a 17 inch waist in my early twenties and was thin, but not underweight.
I think a lot of those pictures where her waist looks impossibly tiny are a bit of costume trickery. Notice how the dresses have wide skirts or a broad train? Her waist seems tiny. So blame Dior’s “New Look”
In costumes where she doesn’t have a train or a skirt, she has a slim, athletic waist.
I’ve seen a couple of magazine covers that appear to have some photo trickery in them . Today we’d call them 'shopped.
Also, some women have slender wasp waists naturally.
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Damnit, I just did the same.
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