Grace Jones and Dolph Lundgren. Photographed by Helmut Newton, 1983.
 
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until I can’t remember that far back—the 80s were a weird, wonderful decade. And a perfect example of how wonderful it was is the unexpected coupling of 6’5” actor Dolph Lundgren and enigmatic Jamaican-born powerhouse, Grace Jones.

Born in Stockholm, before he got into acting Lundgren was an accomplished scholar who by the time 1982 arrived had already received a scholarship to fulfill his Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Sydney in Australia. While he was in Australia, Lundgren worked security detail for musicians like Joan Armatrading, Dr. Hook and Grace Jones—and his chance meeting with Jones would turn into a four-year love affair. In 1983 Lundgren was the recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to the equally prestigious MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston. According to Dolph he would arrive on the legendary campus on his motorcycle with a leather-clad Jones in tow. At Jones’ urging Dolph soon switched gears and headed to New York to study drama. He worked security at the Limelight nightclub until Limelight boss Peter Gatien caught him eating a sandwich in a stairwell and fired him. But thanks to Jones’ deep connections in the world of entertainment he landed his first acting gig with his exotic paramour in the last James Bond film to star Roger Moore, 1985’s A View to a Kill. 

1985 would be a pretty big year for the couple. Jones and Lundgren were immortalized together in a stunning photographic series by Helmut Newton that appeared in the July issue of Playboy magazine. Lundgren would then land the role of “Ivan Drago” in the 1985 film Rocky IV that would propel him to stardom. Sadly it wouldn’t be long before things got weird between the gorgeous duo and according to her 2015 book I’ll Never Write My Memoirs Jones’ recalled the moment when her beautiful union with Lundgren would begin to dissolve: after she showed up at his hotel in Los Angeles with a gun. Here’s more from Jones on how that went:

I actually had a gun. It seemed very natural that I would go and fetch Dolph holding a gun. I did so out of desperation — we had been together for years and had made this move to L.A., a place I absolutely loathed, against my better judgment, and then he comes back from being away and Tom [Holbrook, Dolph’s manager] blocks me from even saying hi. What is going on?

We turned up at the hotel, not to shoot anyone, but to make sure he came with us. We banged on the door of his room. Bang, bang, bang! I’ve got a gun! I’m screaming, “Let him out, you bastard!” It was as though Tom was holding him hostage and we had come to rescue him, hair flying, legs flailing, breasts heaving, guns flashing, music pumping. This was the kind of hysteria that took place in Los Angeles. In one of the many lives I never got to live, another Grace (one who never came true) shot Dolph there and then… And that was the end of the ballad of Grace and Dolph.

Later in the book Jones also tells the story of setting Lundgren’s clothes on fire. The couple called it a day before anyone got killed sometime in 1986. I’ve included images from the former power couple’s Playboy shoot as well as a nice assortment of other photos of the two canoodling back in the day that will remind you that love doesn’t follow any kind of rules, and should never have to be subject to them. Some of the images are slightly NSFW.
 

 

A photo shot by Helmut Newton of Jones and Lundgren that appeared in Playboy Magazine in July of 1985.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Helmut Newton’s photographs of statuesque beauties in and out of bondage is like Irving Klaw in Imax. Instead of Bettie Page in a maid’s uniform, you have Sigourney Weaver in black vinyl straddling a mountain of celluloid or a naked Charlotte Rampling lounging on a decadent bed of animal skins. What Klaw had started in threadbare studios in New York, Newton took to another level in Hollywood and Europe, creating images of power, domination and submission in a landscape of futuristic cool. The essential dynamics of old school bondage mags had been given a heavy shot of vitamin B12 and slathered in radioactive lacquer. The subjects became the rich and the famous of the art and entertainment worlds.

Newton’s women were often Amazons towering over their surroundings with statuesque grace, glacial ferocity and impenetrable mystery. These were the goddesses of myth and beneath the steely surfaces, there was a sense of menace and the uneasy feeling, for men, that these women did not need the male sex at all.

In his portraits of men, Newton often parodied machismo and subverted concepts of masculine power. Often in recline, men were beautiful blunt objects radiating glimmerings of delicateness.

1989’s Frames From The Edge was directed by Pink Floyd documentarian Adrian Maben and he does an admirable job of capturing Newton’s creative process as well as shedding light on him as a person through insightful interviews with Weaver, Rampling, Bob Evans, Catherine Deneuve, Karl Lagerfield and more.

Newton’s influence on the visuals of advertising, rock ‘n’ roll and fashion are undeniable. And while his art is associated with cool facades, with noirish undertones of murder and mayhem, and the dark seductive tug of sexual power, there is a tremendous amount of tenderness in much of his work.

It is this tenderness that is bursting through the restraints that his subjects are often bound by, both literally and figuratively. The gloves are always about to come off in his photographs.