Stardom is infinitely precarious. For every Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck, there are dozens, nay hundreds, of young performers who were all the rage for something closer to 15 minutes. There are Hollywood careers (Marilyn Monroe, for instance) that went down in legend as incandescent, and vividly remembered, but all too brief. A far vaster majority – even if they may have come billed as another studio’s answer to Monroe – has faded into obscurity for reasons that have little to do with their talent.
Here we celebrate 10 in that latter category, who made a unique impression, or led immensely dramatic lives, but haven’t been immortalised as Monroe was. Several were more than actors, with dancing, singing, or hostessing careers that ran in parallel. Some, sensing that longevity on the silver screen was not in the cards, stepped purposefully out of the limelight. Others found it tragically extinguished.
Texas Guinan (1884-1933)
Guinan was a powerful actress-producer in the early silent era, forming her own company to play tough cowgirls in westerns who tame the men in films such as The Moonshine Feud (1920) and The White Squaw (1920). Abruptly, though, she switched from screen stardom to becoming a nightclub hostess through the Prohibition, greeting crowds in New York with her signature catchphrase “Hello, sucker!”
Most of her roughly 33 features are now lost, but her notoriety lived on. She was arrested several times for operating speakeasies, though never convicted, and amused police and reporters at the time with endless renditions of The Prisoner’s Song. When she died from dysentery aged 49, more than 7,000 people attended her funeral.
Mae West’s first film role in Night After Night (1932) was based on Guinan’s persona as a sultry hostess – so were aspects of Velma Kelly in Chicago. Paramount indulged her with a biopic, the Technicolor musical Incendiary Blonde, starring Betty Hutton.
Key films
- The Gun Woman (1918)
- The She Wolf (1919)
- Queen of the Night Clubs (1929)
Joyzelle Joyner (1905-1980)
The Alabama-born Joyner, who started hoofing in bit parts around 1924, is best remembered for her suggestive turn in Cecil B DeMille’s swords-and-sandals blockbuster The Sign of the Cross (1932). As Ancaria, an exotic dancer in ancient Rome, she performed the Dance of the Naked Moon to seduce an innocent Christian girl. After the Hays Code came in, the scene’s lesbian overtones proved too much for the censors; it was cut from the film on its re-release in 1944.
Well before this hullabaloo, Joyner’s sensuality on screen piqued the jealousy of her husband Dudley Brand, who tried to kill her in 1927. He shot her twice through their closed bedroom door. Joyner recovered from her injuries, divorced him, and went on to more memorable roles, including twin Queens of Mars Loo Loo and (the evil one) Boo Boo in the bonkers sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine (1930). Retiring prematurely from films because the Production Code left no room for her talents, she lived a quiet life in California until the age of 75.
Key films
- Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925); available to watch on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV
- Just Imagine (1930); Amazon Prime Video
- The Sign of the Cross (1932); Mubi
Patricia Medina (1919-2012)
Medina was born in Liverpool to an English mother and a Spanish father, the latter a lawyer and former opera singer from the Canary Islands called Laureano Ramón Medina Nebot. The match produced her striking, Ava Gardner-esque looks – according to one headline, “The Most Beautiful Face in the Whole of England”. She was tested at Elstree in her late teens (“I was awful – the fact is I couldn’t act”, she would admit), but things picked up when she moved to Hollywood with her first husband, Richard Greene, the matinee idol.
A prolific post-war career followed, as did a second marriage to Joseph Cotten, whom she met when making Mr Arkadin (1955) with Orson Welles. She rarely had opportunities to stretch herself beyond playing the love interest in swashbuckling period pieces. While she resented this typecasting (“In movies, I was never offered anything but sexy bad girls”), she did enjoy playing up to her decadent screen image. Once, when asked by a Rome customs officer why she had brought two mink coats, she retorted: “I might decide to stay two days.”
Key films
- The Fortunes of Captain Blood (1950); available to watch on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video
- Captain Pirate (1952)
- Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954); Apple TV
Martine Carol (1920-1967)
Before Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot, who would eclipse her, there was Martine Carol. With her hourglass figure and voluminous blonde hair, she would often be cast as a cool seductress, but her real life contained more shocking drama than her films.
She was married four times in more than 18 years, attempted suicide after an affair with the married Georges Marechal went south, and was once briefly kidnapped by Pierre Loutrel, the notorious French gangster (aka “Pierrot le fou”). Clearly overwhelmed by her charms, he set her free the next day and and even gave her a bunch of red roses as an apology.
Carol was still working on her last film, Hell is Empty, when she died of a heart attack in her Monte Carlo hotel room. The circumstances of her sudden death were considered faintly mysterious at the time. Scandal didn’t end there, either: her grave in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery was robbed a week later, after reports that she had been buried with her jewellery.
Key films
- Beauties of the Night (1952)
- Lola Montès (1955)
- Around the World in 80 Days (1956); available to watch on Amazon Prime Video
Joi Lansing (1929-1972)
Lansing, sometimes called the “Marilyn Monroe of television”, was discovered at 14 and signed for MGM’s talent school. For years, a vast quantity of her performances were uncredited, in walk-on roles such as “Art Model”, “Pretty Girl”, “Chorus Girl”, “Cocktail Waitress” and “Harem Girl”. It was in sci-fi B-movies and noirs that she was finally given a break. It’s she who plays Zita, the doomed dancer who can hear the bomb ticking in the famous tracking shot that begins Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958).
Often scantily dressed in bust-accentuating outfits, she wouldn’t quite match the big-screen fame of her rival Jayne Mansfield, and found a niche instead as Gladys Flatt, the glamorous wife of a bluegrass player, in Sixties sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.
Wishing later in life that she’d had more recognition, she would die young, just 43, from breast cancer. Her final years, however, were her most sensational, thanks to a covert lesbian affair with 20-year-old ingénue Alexis Hunter, her co-star in the grade-Z monster flick Bigfoot (1970). The full details of this only emerged in 2015 when Hunter wrote her memoir, Joi Lansing: A Body to Die For – A Love Story.
Key films
- Hot Cars (1956); available to watch on Amazon Prime Video
- The Atomic Submarine (1959); Amazon Prime Video
- Marriage on the Rocks (1965); Apple TV and YouTube
Vikki Dougan (b. 1929)
Vikki “The Back” Dougan only had a handful of small film roles – 10, to be precise – but her scandalous backless dresses made her an icon of Fifties glamour, whose curves would inspire Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
Dougan started modelling as a teenager and continued to do so through the 1950s, appearing on full-page spreads in the likes of Life, Playboy and Harper’s Bazaar. She dated a remarkable string of high-profile boyfriends, including Barry Goldwater Jr, Mickey Rooney, Henry Fonda, Frank Sinatra and Glenn Ford. A 1961 folk album by The Limeliters named a song after her, “Vikki Dougan”, which celebrated her “callipygian cleft” and asked her “Vikki, turn your back on me…”
In January 1964, Cavalier magazine featured 12 nude photographs of Dougan in a pictorial entitled “The Back is Back”. Dougan filed a lawsuit against the publisher, arguing that she had withdrawn permission for the photos to be printed.
Key films
- The Tunnel of Love (1958); available to watch on Tubi and Amazon Prime Video
- Here Come the Jets (1959); Mubi
- Hootenanny Hoot (1963); Mubi
Allison Hayes (1930-1977)
In a very literal sense, Hayes landed the biggest role of the 1950s in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, playing a wealthy socialite who grows to an enormous size after a run-in with an alien.
Hayes might have gone on to more prestigious work had she not been plagued so consistently by awful health. On the sets of both Sign of the Pagan (1954) and Gunslinger (1956), she was badly injured – indeed, when she sued Universal Pictures for the former accident, they released her from her contract and coldly sacked her from a role in Foxfire (1955).
As her film career waned, she gravitated to television, but couldn’t walk without inexplicable pain and the use of a cane. It transpired that calcium supplements she had been taking, made from bone meal, were contaminated with lead. She mounted a campaign to have the FDA ban the supplement, but it was too late for Hayes, who was diagnosed with leukaemia and died at just 46.
Key films
- Sign of the Pagan (1954); available to watch on Mubi
- Zombies of Mora Tau (1957); Mubi
- Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958); Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video
Mamie Van Doren (b. 1931)
The US press in the 1950s, besotted with the appeal of blonde bombshells, liked to refer to the “three Ms” – Monroe, Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren. The three were friends. Van Doren was signed by Universal in 1953, very much in the hope that she would be their equivalent of Monroe over at 20th Century Fox. A self-described “sex kitten”, she played dozens of reckless party girls for the next two decades. Behind the scenes, she was married five times, and had flings with all the obvious stars – Clark Gable, Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley and Steve McQueen.
The kind of industry respect Monroe craved was even more elusive for Van Doren, especially after Universal opted not to renew her contract in 1959. She carried on in films, but they were sleazy fare – the likes of Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women (1968). She was prouder of entertaining troops in Vietnam at USO shows, and visiting amputees and burn victims in hospital. Van Doren still works as a nonagenarian model, and since 2007 has sold her own brand of wine, “Mamitage”.
Key films
- Untamed Youth (1957)
- Teacher’s Pet (1958); available to watch on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV
- Girls Town (1959); Archive.org
Aleshia Brevard (1937-2017)
In 1962, Aleshia (formerly Alfred) Brevard became one of the first Americans to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Beforehand, she found jobs doing Marilyn Monroe impressions at Finocchio’s, a fabled club for female impersonators in San Francisco. “I grew up balancing a Modern Screen Magazine on my bony knee and dreaming of becoming the silver screen’s next bombshell,” she would write.
After transitioning, Brevard worked as a model and Playboy bunny as a route into film and TV. While her supporting part opposite Don Knotts in The Love God? (1969) – a galling flop – was not the breakthrough it was intended to be, she appeared on TV revues such as The Red Skelton Show and The Dean Martin Show, and notched up a handful more miscellaneous film credits. Throughout her life, Brevard did not wish to be labelled “transgender” but to live as a woman without anyone knowing her birth status – even to the point of being married, four times, to men who had no idea.
Key films
- The Love God? (1969); available on DVD
- The Female Bunch (1971); Amazon Prime Video
- The Man with Bogart’s Face (1980); Mubi
Edwige Fenech (b. 1948)
Quentin Tarantino is obsessed with Edwige Fenech, a major Italian star of the 1970s in the worlds of giallo horror and schlocky sex comedies. She was lured out of retirement by Eli Roth, on Tarantino’s urging, to play a mysterious art teacher in Hostel: Part 2 (2007), and in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Mike Myers’s General Ed Fenech is named after her.
She was quite the cult figure from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s, appearing in a whole variety of erotic thrillers and murder mysteries for some of the biggest names in Italian genre cinema, including Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci.
Her credits are nearly up in the triple-figure range, and her immortality for horror fans is assured, even if she’s an obscure name these days in the wider culture. Latterly, she has set up her own respected production company, which helped bring the Al Pacino version of The Merchant of Venice (2004) to the screen.
Key films
- Samoa, Queen of the Jungle (1968); available to watch on Mubi
- Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972); Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video
- Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975); Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video
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