‘Calendar Girls’ Get Naked for Charity Again

The original “Calendar Girls” have taken their clothes off for charity again 10 years after they first inspired a Hollywood movie and started a national craze for nude calendars.

Wearing little more than a smile and a trademark set of pearls, six members of the Yorkshire-based Women’s Institute have been reunited for a new 2010 calendar.

The youngest of them, Chris Clancy, is now 57; the oldest, Beryl Bamforth, is 75. They are pictured in typical WI scenes, their modesty protected only by a baby-grand piano, a tea pot and sprouting broccolli on a vegetable patch.

The women launched the full color calendar for Leukemia Research at Harvey Nicholls in Leeds yesterday.

Angela Baker, 63, whose husband’s death from lymphoma led to the idea for the first calendar, was surprised that people were celebrating their reunion.

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “We were a little worried whether anyone would turn up 10 years on but it has been brilliant to see you are.”

With a combined age of 379, the women are perhaps old enough to know better by now. But Mrs Baker suggested not and said she could not rule out another calendar in the future.

She said: “I think if we’re all still there, and we didn’t look too awful … [but] we would definitely have to have bigger props.”

[Click thumbnails for a larger view]

When they made the original calendar in 1999, the women’s ambition was to generate enough money to buy a sofa for a hospital waiting room.

But over the next decade, they found themselves traveling the world, being portrayed in a West End play and by Dame Helen Mirren in a film, and have now raised around Â£2 million for Leukemia Research.

Meanwhile, almost every WI, fire brigade and sports team in the country have followed their lead.

The 2010 calendar is the first to be shot in color rather than sepia.

Mrs Baker, 63, who can be seen playing the piano in February, said: “I was a bit apprehensive about colour, because older women can look a bit funny in colour, and we wanted it to be just as good as the first one.

“Then, when I did see it in colour, I thought ‘Well, maybe, why not?”‘

‘Calendar Girls’ Get Naked for Charity Again

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