Hazel Court, 1926 - 2008.

Hazel Court, a British actress who began as a popular ingénue and became a cult figure as a "scream queen" in horror films on both sides of the Atlantic, died on Tuesday in Lake Tahoe, Calif....

A redheaded, leggy, green-eyed beauty who was a busy film actress and a pinup girl in England in the 1950s, and who went on to make dozens of guest appearances on American television, Ms 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 like 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.

Bruce Weber, the New York Times.

Updated through 4/22.

I had always admired her as an actress; she was as comfortable in period pictures as in contemporary ones, she could be prim, saucy or serious. Also, I had always admired her as a woman - and I do mean always: I have vivid memories of being dazzled, in my single-digit years, by the galaxy of freckles revealed by some of the low-cut gowns she wore in some of the Poe pictures.... So my expectations before meeting her were great, but the woman I met that afternoon was extraordinary. Warm, civilized, artistic, full of humor, bawdy in the nicest possible way, completely charming.

Tim Lucas.

The best thing about The Raven may be that it gave Ms Court, who spends an awful lot of her time in these movies standing around looking gorgeous waiting for the chance to need rescuing, a chance to be regal and bitchy - at one point, she laughs enchantingly while Karloff threatens her own daughter with a red-hot poker - in a way that left a lasting impression on many a young movie-watching poetry enthusiast.

Phil Nugent, ScreenGrab.

As I confessed to GreenCine a few years back: Throughout most of my impressionable adolescence, I had a serious crush on Brit actress Hazel Court.

Joe Leydon.

[S]he never seemed stuck up or fussy and when the script required her to be pecked to death by birds or pawed by a mossy Cornish zombie she gamely took her medicine.

Arbogast.

Lush, vibrant, unique ... unforgettable.

C Jerry Kutner, Bright Lights After Dark.

Among her original fans was the horror writer Stephen King: her name would crop up repeatedly in his stories. In his recent memoir, On Writing, he described the thrill of encountering her at a horror film screening. "Who could ask for more?" he wrote. "You might even get Hazel Court wandering around in a lacy low-cut nightgown if you were lucky."

Will Pavia, the London Times.

Update, 4/22: "One of her best roles (also her last in a feature film, apart from a cameo in 1981's Omen II) was in The Masque of the Red Death (1964)," writes Ronald Bergan in the Guardian. "She played Juliana, jealous mistress of Prince Prospero (a sibilantly ghoulish Vincent Price), who brands her ample breast with an inverted cross, with the intention of marrying Satan. Her demise comes when her throat gets torn out by a falcon.... Hazel died only a week before the release of her autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen, published by Tomahawk Press."

Posted by dwhudson at April 19, 2008 1:36 PM