Margia Dean, who co-starred in the cult sci-fi classic The Quatermass experiment and appeared alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, Vincent Price, Esther Williams, and George Reeves in other films, is dead. She was 101.
Dean died June 23 at his apartment in Rancho Cucamonga, California, his niece Denyse Barr said. the hollywood reporter.
From 1948 to 1956, Dean worked on some 20 feature films for producer Robert L. Lippert, founder of B-movie studio Lippert Pictures, earning her the nickname “Lippert’s Queen.”
She acted for Sam Fuller in two of those movies, the first two movies she directed, in fact: Yo shot jesse james (1949), in which she played a lounge singer, and Price, starring The Arizona Baron (1950).
Based on a popular series from the BBC, Hammer Films. The Quatermass experiment (1956), directed by Val Guest and starring Brian Donlevy, tells the story of an astronaut (Richard Wordsworth) who crash-lands on Earth and is transformed into an alien organism that threatens humanity.
Dean played the astronaut’s wife, who foolishly helps him escape from a hospital. “I go crazy,” she pointed out in a western clippings interview.
Dean also acted with Richard Arlen in Grand Canyon (1949), with Reeves in Superman and the Mole Men (1951), with Charles Chaplin Jr. in fangs of the wild (1954), with Eastwood in Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958), with Brian Keith in Town!! (1958) and with Williams on the circus set the big show (1961).
He appeared in some 60 films during his two-decade career.
Margia Dean with Scott Brady in 1958 Ambush at Cimarron Pass
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
With family roots in Greece, Marguerite Louise Skliris was born in Chicago on April 7, 1922, and raised in San Francisco. Her father, Evangelis, was a lawyer.
After performing on stage as a child, she won a National Women’s Shakespearean Pageant at age 15 and the titles of Miss San Francisco and Miss California before competing for the 1939 Miss America award, finishing first runner-up behind Patricia Donnelly.
“I won the talent show in that contest playing Shakespeare when I should have sung! I have a kind of stifling voice,” she said. “After I lost to Donnelly, they told me that singing would have been better, since talking about Shakespeare was not the kind of thing that a Miss America could do for the whole country.”
She returned to San Francisco to end up at Galileo High School, performed at the Biltmore Theater in downtown Los Angeles, and made her big screen debut at Republic Pictures. Casanova in Burlesque (1944), starring Joe E. Brown and June Havoc.
His first big role came in the sequel. shep comes home (1948), funded by Lippert. They later became involved, he explained in Mark Thomas McGee’s 2014 book, Talk is Cheap, Action is Expensive: The Films of Robert L. Lippert.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong. She was running with a married man,” she recalled. “I don’t think I ever loved him, but he was crazy about me. He gave me all this work, and he was nice to be around. He made it easy for me ”.
His resume also included red desert (1949), First row (1949), fbi girl (1951), the lonely path (1955) by Raoul Walsh Mamie Stover’s Rebellion (1956), The secret of the purple reef (1960), 7 women from hell (1961) and moorish witch doctor (1964), his last acting credit.
Dean was also a producer on the long rope (1961), starring Hugh Marlow, and the horror of it all (1964), starring Pat Boone. She later served as a vice president at a real estate/construction company and owned a clothing store in Brentwood and a coffee shop in Beverly Hills.
Dean lived for six decades in a house in the Hollywood Hills before moving to Dana Point, California. “She was a remarkable, brilliant and generous lady with exquisite taste,” said her niece.
Survivors include her husband, Spanish architect, author and singer Felipe Álvarez, 92, whom she met at a cafe on the Sunset Strip and married in Mexico in August 1965; nieces Denyse, Christina, Lisette, Irene and Olga; and nephews Jose, Richard and Miguel.
Dean’s first husband was Hal Fischer, a noted basketball player and coach. After she ended their six-year marriage in 1945, she dated Prince Aly Khan, the third husband of actress Rita Hayworth.
