Born: 10 February, 1926, in Sutton Coldfield.
Died: 15 April, 2008, in California, aged 82. HAZEL Court was a British actress who became a cult figure as a "scream queen" in horror films on both sides of the Atlantic.
A
redheaded, leggy, green-eyed beauty who was a busy film actress and a pin-up girl in the 1950s, and who went on to make dozens of guest appearances on American television, Court had a long and varied professional life, including a second career as a sculptor.
But she became best known for showing considerable cleavage and screaming bloody murder in movies such as Devil Girl From Mars (1954), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961) and Roger Corman's treatments of three works by Edgar Allan Poe: Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
In the last two, her best-known films, she co-starred with Vincent Price.
"She knew it wasn't serious acting," her daughter, Sally Walsh, said. "She and Vincent were extremely close, and they found humour in everything."
Born near Birmingham in 1926, Court began acting on stage as a teenager and first appeared on screen in an uncredited bit part in the 1944 film Champagne Charlie.
Over the next decade and a half, she graduated to featured roles and then to leads, marrying her first husband, the actor Dermot Walsh, along the way. They divorced in 1963, and she later married Don Taylor, the American actor and director, who died in 1998.
Court first visited the United States in 1958, when CBS imported a television series filmed in London, a cross-cultural situation comedy called Dick and the Duchess, in which she starred with Patrick O'Neal as an English girl married to an American man. She also filmed the first of four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Court eventually relocated to Los Angeles. From 1962-72 she appeared frequently in television series.
Her acting career ended in the 1970s, when she took up stone sculpture, studying in Italy and accepting commissions that included one for Pennsylvania State University's library.
She also wrote an autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen. In the book, she wrote that though she might have achieved renown as an actress who shrieked and bled with abandon, she always retained the ladylike primness with which she was raised.
She is survived by her two daughters, a son and two stepdaughters.
The full article contains 411 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
