prepossessing

The most titanic competitor I ever watched in any field was the least physically prepossessing: Chris Evert, who took apart the famed trans tennis player Renee Richards, 6-1, 6-0, in the 1979 U.S.

He was not a physically prepossessing young fellow.

They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing.

Even the British explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton wasn’t immune: “Truly prepossessing was our first view of the then mysterious island of Zanzibar,” he wrote in “Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast” in 1872.

“I believe that unless a major part on stage or screen explicitly calls for an unsightly person,” Mr. Simon once wrote in New York magazine, “it is better filled by a performer who is, besides being talented, prepossessing.”