![]() ![]() Playboy, though, certainly didn’t hurt her movie career. The nude photos also were used against her as she fought for custody of her son in a years-long battle with her ex-husband. “I had been dropped from my contract at 20th Century Fox, didn’t know a soul in Los Angeles and had a child to support,” she said. The magazine shoot was something she said she always regretted (though she would appear again in Playboy in 1965 and ’68). Stevens did make her film debut as a chorus girl in Say One for Me (1959) - sharing the Golden Globe for most promising female newcomer with Tuesday Weld, Angie Dickinson and Janet Munro - and then attracted attention as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for January 1960. She was supposed to portray Jean Harlow in a biopic, but the movie did not get made until years later. Dick Powell directed her in a screen test, and she signed with 20th Century Fox, making $250 a week. She married a classmate, Herman Stephens, at age 15, had her son when she was 16 and got divorced at 17.Ī department store model, Stevens (she adopted a version of her married name for her stage name) appeared in a production of Bus Stop while attending Memphis State and got a great review in the local newspaper. She and her family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, when she was 4, and she spent a great deal of time in the movie theater behind their home. Stevens, who appeared three times in Playboy magazine, had an explicit love scene with Jim Brown in Slaughter (1972) - some moviegoers in the South did not approve of their coupling - and fought a fierce battle with Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975).Ī self-described tomboy, Stevens said she liked to get physical - witness the great knock-down, drag-out fight she had with Wonder Woman ( Lynda Carter) on the first episode of the ABC series in 1975.Įstelle Caro Eggleston was born an only child on Oct. In the classic disaster film The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Stevens endured a damp, grueling shoot as Ernest Borgnine’s determined ex-streetwalker wife, performing many of her own stunts. She convinced jazzman Bobby Darin to abandon his idealistic dreams in John Cassavetes‘ Too Late Blues (1961) and played whores with hearts of gold in Rage (1966) and Sam Peckinpah‘s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), respectively. Stevens, though, did stand out in dramas. “The sex has always been ‘comedy sex.’ A lot of the serious dramatic roles I’ve played, I’ve thought to myself, ‘Oh God, they were dreary.’ I like the pacing of comedy, the excitement of it.” “I am basically a comedienne, I always have been,” she told Skip E. Her character, the coed Stella Purdy, finds herself attracted to Love but also sees something in Kelp. Kelp, a college chemistry professor who invents a potent cocktail that transforms him into swinging ladies’ man Buddy Love. Her signature role, however, came in The Nutty Professor (1963), produced, directed, co-written and starring Jerry Lewis as the nice but nerdy Julius F. Stevens also starred opposite Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), a movie she said she detested. Wayne Kramer, Co-Founder of Revolutionary Rock Band the MC5, Dies at 75 Shining brightest in light comedies, the blond, blue-eyed actress appeared as a shy beauty contestant from Montana in Vincente Minnelli’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963), portrayed a headstrong nun in Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows! (1968) opposite Rosalind Russell and frolicked with the fun-loving Dean Martin in two films: the Matt Helm spy spoof The Silencers (1966) and How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life (1968). “She had been in hospice for quite some time with Stage 7 Alzheimer’s,” he said. ![]() Stevens died Friday in Los Angeles, her son, actor-producer-director Andrew Stevens, told The Hollywood Reporter. Stella Stevens, the screen siren of the 1960s who brought sweet sexiness to such films as The Nutty Professor, Too Late Blues and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, has died. ![]()
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