Hazel Court

 Hazel Court (February 10, 1926 – April 15, 2008)

At the age of sixteen, Court met film director Anthony Asquith in London; the meeting won her a brief part in Champagne Charlie (1944). Court won a British Critics Award for her role as a crippled girl in Carnival (1946) and also appeared in Holiday Camp (1947) and Bond Street (1948). Her first role in a fantasy film was in Ghost Ship (1952). One of Court's most remembered films is the cult classic Devil Girl from Mars (1954). She trained at the Rank Organisation's "charm school". Court wanted to act in comedy films but she also continued to appear in horror films and, in 1957, had what was to become a career-defining role in the first color Hammer Horror film The Curse of Frankenstein. In the 1957–58 television season, she co-starred in a CBS sitcom filmed in England, Dick and the Duchess, in the role of Jane Starrett, a patrician Englishwoman married to an American insurance claims investigator living in London, a role played by Patrick O'Neal. Court traveled back and forth between Hollywood and England, appearing in four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She had parts in A Woman of Mystery (1958), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) and Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961) among others. By the early 1960s, Court had permanently moved to the United States. She was featured in the Edgar Allan Poe horror films The Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), the last two with Vincent Price.

She appeared on occasion in the popular early 1960s TV series (each episode a stand-alone drama), the Dick Powell Theater. She also appeared in episodes of several TV series, including Adventures in Paradise, Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, Danger Man, Twelve O'Clock High, Burke's Law, Sam Benedict, Gidget, McMillan and Wife, Mannix, The Wild Wild West, Thriller, and in "The Fear", the penultimate episode of the original 1960's The Twilight Zone. Court died of a heart attack at her home near Lake Tahoe, California, on April 15, 2008, aged 82.