Obituary: Beverly Garland (original) (raw)

The 1950s was the most fertile period in American cinema for low-budget science-fiction and horror movies, and any screen actor associated with them gained cult status. One such was Beverly Garland, the spirited heroine in many a B-movie, who has died aged 82. In contrast, Garland found a different form of fame when she co-starred in My Three Sons during the latter years of the popular American TV sitcom. It was a sign of her versatility, in a career which lasted more than half a century.

She was born Beverly Fessenden, in Santa Cruz, California, where she studied drama under Anita Arliss, the sister of the celebrated stage and screen actor George Arliss. After some theatre and radio work, she appeared anonymously, while in her late teens, in a soft-porn short film called Fanny With the Cheeks of Tan, in which she stripped to her underwear. Taking her name from her first husband, to whom she was briefly married at 18, she made her feature film debut fully dressed as Beverly Campbell in Rudolph Maté's gripping film noir D.O.A. (1950) in which she played a duplicitous secretary.

A year later, she married the B-movie actor Richard Garland, and changed her name again for good. But it was only after they divorced in 1953 that she began to get featured roles in such non-classics as Problem Girls - Garland is the sex-starved one in a reform school - and The Neanderthal Man, in which, after posing in a bathing suit for a photo taken by her boyfriend, she is carried off by the eponymous creature, who presumably has his stone-age way with her. "You don't have to act in these pictures," she later remarked. "All you have to do is possess a good pair of lungs. I can scream with more variations from shrill to vibrato than any other girl in pictures."

In 1954, Garland made six films, including Bitter Creek, a Wild Bill Elliott western; the Miami Story, in which she holds the Chicago Gangster Barry Sullivan at gunpoint while he is undressing, saying: "No matter how much you take off, my gun will still keep you covered," and Killer Leopard, a late entry in the Bomba, the Jungle Boy series.

After her divorce from her second husband, she started a relationship with Roger Corman, who was just embarking on his career as the self-styled "Orson Welles of the Z-movie". Between 1955 and 1957, Garland made five enjoyably bad quickies for Corman, in which she emerged as a tough but sexy dame. Garland is the nastiest of a gang of escaped convicts in Swamp Women (1955), and the widow of a town marshal who straps on his guns to seek revenge for his killing in Gunslinger (1956). In It Conquered The World (1956), she grabs a rifle and goes after a Venusian who resembles a pointed hat with arms, horns and lots of teeth. Scoffing at the bemused space creature, she says: "You think you're going to make a slave of the world!" Unfortunately, the gun has no effect and the monster begins to devour her. "I hope you choke!" she screams as she disappears down its throat.

In Naked Paradise (1957), filmed in Hawaii, seen as often as possible in what were called "cheesecake shots", in a bathing suit, she is a gangster's moll and, at the top of her form, as a plucky nurse giving blood transfusions to a vampire in Not of This Earth (1957). "I never considered myself very much of a passive kind of actress," she explained. "I was never very comfortable in love scenes, never comfortable playing a sweet, lovable lady."

During the same period, Garland was appearing regularly on television, notably in Decoy as Casey Jones, the first police woman lead in a television series. The show ran for 37 episodes from 1957 to 1959, paving the way for other female cop series. Her farewell to schlock came in The Alligator People (1959) as a woman who searches for her missing husband only to find him in the Louisiana bayou transformed into a reptile.

From then on, Garland concentrated most of her energies on television roles, and her marriage to the land developer Fillmore Crank. From 1972, she was also involved in running the hotel that she and her husband built in north Hollywood, called Beverly Garland's Holiday Inn.

None of this prevented her from continuing her acting career, even gaining new audiences with her role in My Three Sons. The sitcom had been going for nine years when Garland joined it in 1969 and, in a way, the whole premise of the series - a widower (Fred MacMurray) trying to bring up his three sons with the help of an uncle in an all-male household - was undermined by the father getting married again. Somehow Garland carried it off, never just content to be the recipient of a "Honey, I'm home" greeting, she retained her attractiveness and independence. "The only thing that bothers me is that everybody loves this character so much," Garland commented during the run. "I don't remember anybody loving me all that much." Among her other regular appearances were in the soap opera spoof Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77), Scarecrow and Mrs King (1983-87) and Seventh Heaven (1997-2004).

A widow since 1999, Garland is survived by a son and a daughter by her third husband, and his two children.