Angelyne
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Angyline Angelyne (known as "Angelyne") is a model and sometime actress who has become an icon of Hollywood and Los Angeles best known for purchasing billboards advertising herself. Perhaps the best description of Angelyne is that, as she says, "Barbie wishes she were me."[citation needed] Although Angelyne initially paid for her own billboards (there are rumors of a wealthy patron, possibly her husband) billboard companies now donate space to her as a way to draw the public's attention to a newly constructed billboard.[citation needed] She is often spotted driving a hot pink Corvette, and one billboard paid for by a local dealership shows her posing in front of a new Corvette.[citation needed]
Angelyne has not given her age or birthdate in interviews, although the IMDB lists 1958 without providing a source. Her billboards started showing up in the early- to mid-1980s.
Angelyne was one of the candidates in the 2003 California recall election, finishing 29th in a field of 135 candidates. She was also a candidate for Hollywood city council in 2002 if it were to secede from Los Angeles.
Her billboards have gained more fame than she, and appear in several movies, such as Escape from L.A., starring Kurt Russell. As Russell's character walks up Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles in ruins around him, he looks up to see a pristine Angelyne billboard. One has also appeared in the movie Volcano, starring Tommy Lee Jones. Her billboards are prominent in the movie Get Shorty. On the animated television show Futurama, the main character Philip J. Fry sees an Angelyne billboard after waking up from a thousand-year long cryogenic sleep. In the "A Star Is Born-Again" episode of The Simpsons, an Angelyne billboard is briefly seen during Ned Flanders's L.A. dream sequence. The billboard was also spoofed in Shrek 2 featuring Fairy Godmother in the same iconic pose. In the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, a news reporter covering a tornado outbreak in downtown L.A. is struck and killed by an Angelyne billboard thrown at him by one of the tornadoes. Some of her earliest exposure came when her billboard appeared in the opening montage of the hit TV show Moonlighting.
When being interviewed by the Malibu High School newspaper The Surfwriter, she said she is a billboard princess, not queen, because "princesses have more fun."[citation needed]