Two beauties who aged gracefully:
Helen Mirren yesterday.
Anna Lee in her later years.
Yowza. I came in to post about Angela Lansbury, but Anna Lee! Wow.
Jessica Tandy back in the day. Hottie! Here, too. And here.
I know she doesn’t really fit with the rules of the OP, but can I just go ahead and add Lindsey Lohan now? She was once, easily, the best looking woman in Hollywood (I’ve always had a thing for redheads), but now she looks like an ‘okay, but give me a couple more for the road’ middle aged woman you meet at some rural bowling alley bar.
…and why oh why did she lose the red hair? So sad…
A couple of men who were fat old guys when I was young:
Marlon Brando
Orson Wells
And here are some guys who aren’t that old, but the young dopers may only have seen them as middle aged and fat:
Dan Aykroyd
Tom Hanks
Alec Baldwin
How about “proud”? Cuz my grandmother was a jawdropping fox. We have a picture of her in her, oh, early twenties maybe, dolled up in the ski gear of the day and swooshing the slopes. Smokin’ and athletic.
I’ll see your Dan Akroyd and raise you a Harold Ramis. He went from Ghostbusters hottie to gramps in 20 years. A very huggable grandpa, though. 
If you only know John Heard as a heavyset guy in flicks like The Pelican Brief, he was smokin’ in Cat People.
Brigitte Bardot - admittedly she’s now past seventy
Nitpick: the woman in the second photo, with Laurence Olivier, is Joan Fontaine, not Jessica Tandy.
She went to the dogs. [d&r]
Shifting gears, here’s Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was a bit of a swinger back in the '60’s.
I was watching the Hitler Chanell back when all they showed was stock footage of WWII and there was footage of Queen Elizabeth. Wow! She was totally cute back then.
I wish that I could find a photograph, but the only ones I’ve seen were in a book on character actors many years ago. John Banner, bka Sgt. Schulz on Hogan’s Heroes, was a sexy leading man of Austrian theater when he was young, blonde and blue eyed and built, total babe. He fled due to the Nazi takeover (he and his wife were each half-Jewish) and once in America he earned money by posing for U.S. propaganda/military recruitment posters due to his all-American (by way of Austria) good looks. Over the next two decades as he rebuilt his career he turned to fat and got old, so his greatest success was as a chubby aging character actor.
In his early movies John Goodman was very good looking and obviously athletic. He of course changed a bit before Roseanne.
Both my grandmothers were very pretty, but especially my maternal grandmother. I used to have a picture of her when she was around 18, and she was a looker. And my great Aunt Eunice, who I knew as a wrinkled, chain smoking old lady who liked to tell me how much weight I’d gained, was a drop dead gorgeous young woman.
So was mine! She was born in 1905, so she was just the right age to look great in those 1920s flapper styles, and she did!
I’m making post #53 and I’m the first to mention Liz Taylor? :eek:
Angela Lansbury has been mentioned at least twice already, but check out this shot:
No, she wasn’t born 70 years old and white-haired. In her stage and early screen years, she was something of a heartstring-puller with her big brown eyes. See A Farewell to Arms sometime, where Gary Cooper falls in love with her stockinged foot and proceeds to knock her up.
My grandfather was already in his 70’s when I was born, and lived to be more than 100, so all I remember is a little old man. When we came across some old pictures of him a few years ago, my wife actually gasped at how handsome he was when young.
Not that they are unattractive now, but Candace Bergen, Kirstie Alley, Susan Sarandon, and Cybill Sheperd were all smokin’ hot at one time.
Does anyone have any links to photos of the young and hot John Goodman? I’ve been scouring the internets, and got to page 7 of a Google Image Search before I ran into porn, which led me to end the search. Damn it, I’ve got to see it to believe it.
Check out the link in this post. It’s a youtube video of a commercial he did when he was younger.