Originally Posted by Maralyn I think of her not only for the horror films she appeared but as the young quiet sister of Maxwell Reed in the 1947 Eric Portman film "Wanted for Murder". She had talent and beauty and once again another one of the old school is lost to us! Maralyn

'I think the reason those films were so successful was that we all took them very seriously': Court, aged 19, photographed for 'Picture Post'

Hazel Court: Forties film heroine who later became a cult favourite as a horror movie 'Queen of Scream'

INDEPENDENT
Friday, 18 April 2008

Pert and pretty, Hazel Court was a versatile actress who for several years was the epitome of the deceptively demure, often spunky, but very English heroine in British films of the Forties. Her engaging performances in such films as Dear Murderer and Holiday Camp have become largely forgotten, however, due to Court's emergence in the Fifties as the star of early Hammer horrors and the stylish Edgar Allan Poe adaptations made by Roger Corman with such horror icons as Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, which made her a cult favourite with fans of the genre and earned her the label "the Queen of Scream".

The daughter of a professional cricketer, G.W. Court, she was born in Birmingham in 1926 and set her sights on an acting career at an early age. Although her family moved to Sutton Coldfield when she was six months old, she gained her first stage experience with the Birmingham repertory company. When her enterprising sister sent Court's photograph to the director Anthony Asquith, he referred her to Ealing Studios for an interview, and she was given a small role in Champagne Charlie (1944), a salute to Edwardian musical halls starring Tommy Trinder and Stanley Holloway.

Court had one line – "I've never had champagne before" – but she had a better role as leading lady to the comedians Flanagan and Allen in Dreaming (1944), followed by another period musical, Gaiety George (1946). Her popularity grew when she played Sally Gray's crippled sister in Carnival (1946) and Phyllis Calvert's sister in The Root of All Evil (1947), and she had a telling part as a feisty secretary whose fiancé (Maxwell Reed) temporarily ditches her when he falls for the charms of a vamp (Greta Gynt) with a lethally jealous husband (Eric Portman) in Arthur Crabtree's serviceable adaptation of the hit play Dear Murderer.

She was given her first starring role teamed with the American actor William Eythe in Meet Me at Dawn (1947), Thornton Freeland's limp comedy about the escapades of a professional duellist, but she followed it with one of her most memorable performances when loaned to Gainsborough Films to play a leading role in Ken Annakin's Holiday Camp (1947). Annakin's first feature film after six years of making documentaries, the film captured the mood of its time with its economical and imaginative script and its effective use of location footage of a real holiday camp.
"Among a group of young actresses lent to us by Rank," wrote Annakin in his autobiography, "the most outstanding and beautiful was Hazel Court, who incidentally became a friend for life. She played the daughter of Jack Warner and Kathleen Harrison [in their first appearance as the Huggetts] and represented the millions of girls who had lost their men in the war, but were hanging in there."

Holiday Camp was a great success – "The Huggetts absolutely caught the spirit and feeling that existed after the war," said Annakin – and it stands up well today, but Court's subsequent starring roles were in weak movies – a portmanteau film about items being prepared for a wedding, Bond Street (1948), a laboured comedy despite a script by Terence Rattigan and Rodney Ackland, and My Sister and I (1948), an artificial murder mystery that did little for Court or Sally Ann Howes, who played her sister. Also in the cast was Dermot Walsh, who became Court's husband in 1949.

One of Court's better films was George King's Forbidden (1949), in which she gave a spirited portrayal of a fairground ice-cream vendor who falls in love with a married man (Douglas Montgomery) while fending off the advances of a shady spiv, Kenneth Griffith.
She starred with Walsh in two lively "B" thrillers, Ghost Ship (1952) and Counterspy (1953), then in 1954 she played in the first of her "cult" movies, the low-budget sci-fi tale Devil Girl from Mars, in which a leather-clad Martian (Patricia Laffan) comes to Earth to take men back to her female-dominated domain. Lack of funds for special effects resulted in moments like that in which a transformation shot of Laffan is achieved by a simple photographic effect of a rippling image, prompting one onlooker to comment, "Ooh, look, she's gone all wobbly." "That film haunts me!," said Court in a 1990 interview: "Everywhere I go people say, 'Oh, I saw you in Devil Girl from Mars!' I think it only took about two weeks to shoot and it was made on a shoestring. We got paid next to nothing."
After several more "B" movies and a television series, Dick and the Duchess (1957), in which she starred with Patrick O'Neal, Court's red hair and green eyes were seen in colour for the first time when she was cast in the role which would redefine her persona, Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which not only changed the course of her career, but launched the Hammer horror cycle, stretched existing boundaries of gore, and teamed Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee for the first time. "I always thought Peter was living in the wrong century," said Court. "He should have been born in the 1880s. It seemed odd to think of him in the modern day because he gave the impression that he belonged in a costume."
Court's next Hammer movie was Fisher's The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959). "I think a reason those films were so successful," said Court, "was that we all took them very seriously, and managed to convince the audience of our sincerity. There was no tongue-in-cheek attitude until we made The Raven, which was meant to be funny!"
Court was nurse to a mad doctor (Kieron Moore) in her next Hammer movie, Dr Blood's Coffin (1960), then in 1962 she made the first of three films in which she was directed by Roger Corman, The Premature Burial (1962), at the climax of which Ray Milland shovels dirt on her as she lies in a grave. "I was really in there doing my own stunt. The scene required me to hold my breath for a full minute, but they did use cork instead of actual dirt."
Court described Corman's The Raven (1963) as her favourite film "because everybody laughed and joked and it was fun to work with three such talented giants of horror films, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. Karloff was a great charmer, and Peter had great sex appeal. When Peter talked to you, it was as if you were the only person in the world." In 1963 Court divorced Walsh, having established a home in the United States, where she worked frequently on television between movies, and in 1964 she married the actor-director Don Taylor, who had directed her in an episode of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (As an actor, Taylor is best remembered as the young man who marries Elizabeth Taylor in Father of the Bride.)
Nineteen sixty-four was also the year of Court's last major film role, and the most admired of her Corman films, the gaudily exotic Masque of the Red Death, with Vincent Price. "Vincent would always have a twinkle in his eye on the set, laughing and joking, but when we would be shooting, he'd flip right back into character," she said. "We became very good friends. In fact it was Vincent who encouraged me with my painting, which eventually led to sculpting. He loved my work and even bought a number of them."
After retiring to bring up her family, she further developed her interest in sculpture, travelling to Italy every year to carve, and her work was exhibited in public galleries. After Taylor's death in 1998 she enjoyed attending movie conventions and corresponding with fans. She had recently completed her autobiography, due for publication next week, its title reflecting the genre for which she accepted that she was best known, Hazel Court: Horror Queen.

Tom Vallance

Hazel Court, actress: born Birmingham 10 February 1926; married 1949 Dermot Walsh (died 2002; one daughter; marriage dissolved 1963), 1964 Don Taylor (died 1998; one son, one daughter); died Los Angeles 15 April 2008.

Hazel Court
Daily Telegraph
18/04/2008
Hazel Court, who died on Tuesday in California aged 82, brought an impressive cleavage and a penetrating scream to a number of popular horror films.

During the 1960s Hazel Court, a redhead, appeared in three films adapted from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, earning herself the sobriquet "Hollywood Gothic Fox".
In Premature Burial (1962) she was Emily Gault, who was buried alive by her spouse (Ray Milland); in The Raven (1963), directed by Roger Corman, she was Lenore, alongside Peter Lorre, Vincent Price and Boris Karloff; and in The Masque of the Red Death (1964) she played Juliana, mistress of Vincent Price's Prospero, who offers herself up as a sacrifice to Satan.
Born at Sutton Coldfield on February 10 1926, Hazel Court began acting in school plays and in local theatre.
By the age of 11 she was enjoying Gothic novels, and as a fan of the cinema would accompany her parents to see films such as Wuthering Heights and Balalaika (both 1939).
She trained with Birmingham Repertory and from there attended the London Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she perfected her screaming technique. "One can't just scream," she reflected in 2000. "To give a good scream one has to take an enormous breath, and suck one's stomach in, and fill one's lungs and let go."

Shortly after graduating she won a film contract with Rank, making her debut in the Tommy Trinder and Stanley Holloway comedy Champagne Charlie (1944).
Two years later she won praise for her portrayal of a crippled girl in Carnival (1946), which starred Sally Gray and Michael Wilding. She won a Picturegoer magazine award for the role and almost landed the part of Victoria Page, the lead in The Red Shoes (1948) which went instead to Moira Shearer.
Hazel Court enjoyed long runs in plays staged in London, Berlin and France, often accompanied by her first husband, Dermot Walsh, with whom she had a daughter.
She starred with Walsh in The Ghost Ship (1953) and with Patricia Laffan in Devil Girl From Mars (1955), in which she played an alien proposing to transport Earth's male population to Mars for breeding purposes.
This effort was followed in 1957 by Hammer's hit The Curse of Frankenstein. "Hammer studios," Hazel Court recalled, "were like a big, loving family. Peter Cushing was the star attraction and a delight to work with." Less anodyne than Hollywood's excursions into the genre, Hammer's films pursued sensationalism, sexuality and violence, and Hazel Court emerged as the studio's principal female attraction.
Hazel Court appeared in the popular television series Dick and the Duchess, produced in Britain and aired in America on the CBS network in 1957-58. She also made The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), with Delphi Lawrence and Christopher Lee; Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961), in which people mysteriously disappear near a remote Welsh village where a scientist is attempting to revive the dead.
She later worked on segments of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including one episode - The Crocodile Case (1958) - which was directed by Don Taylor, whom she married in 1964.
After a string of appearances on programmes such as The Twilight Zone, The Wild, Wild West and Bonanza, she abandoned films and television to bring up her son by Don Taylor at their mock-Tudor house in Santa Monica.
She re-surfaced during the 1990s to be interviewed for documentaries celebrating the Hammer pictures.

Hazel Court recently published an autobiography, Hazel Court - Horror Queen.
Her husband predeceased her.

From The Times
April 19, 2008
Hazel Court
Actress who found her forte with period horror movies and was dubbed the 'scream queen'


With her piercing scream and what was once described as a “panoramic cleavage”, Hazel Court epitomised the “scream queen” of horror movies in the 1950s and 1960s, first in her native England with Hammer and then in the United States, working with Roger Corman.
She played Frankenstein’s cousin and fiancée, Elizabeth, in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the film that first brought together Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and began Hammer’s series of landmark period horror movies. It also marked the studio’s move into colour, which made the most of Court’s red hair and green eyes.
In the United States she had starring roles in Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The Premature Burial (1962), opposite Ray Milland, The Raven (1963), with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and the young Jack Nicholson, and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
This last is perhaps Corman’s masterpiece and has been compared with the style of Ingmar Bergman. Court and Price are aristocratic devil-worshippers in medieval Italy, instructing a young, innocent peasant girl, played by Jane Asher, in diabolism, while death stalks the land.
Ultimately Court became a celebrated figure with fans of the genre and she spent about ten years working on an autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen (Tomahawk Press), which is published next week, just days after her death at her home at Lake Tahoe, California.
Despite her status with horror fans, she had been in films for more than ten years before The Curse of Frankenstein and was groomed as a leading lady at Gainsborough in the 1940s.
She was born in Birmingham in 1926, the daughter of a cricketer, G. W. Court, who played for Willington. She landed a small role in her first film, the Ealing movie Champagne Charlie (1944), largely by chance. Her sister, Audrey, met the film director Anthony Asquith and the studio executive Norman Loudon socially and happened to show them a picture of Hazel.
According to Court’s autobiography Asquith’s response was to say, “She should be in films”. Court had, however, attended drama school in London and done some theatre before her film debut. She also admits in the new book that she began an affair with Loudon, despite a huge difference in their ages.
Early films ranged from melodrama to comedy, including Holiday Camp (1947), an instalment in the popular series about the Huggett family. She played Phyllis Calvert’s sister in the 1947 melodrama Root of All Evil and co-starred with Dermot Walsh in the 1948 murder mystery My Sister and I. They were married the following year and worked together again in Ghost Ship (1952) and several other films.
But during the 1950s Court slipped into B-movies, including, most notably, Devil Girl from Mars (1954), and she also accepted work on television before Frankenstein revived her career.
Her profile was boosted at about the same time by the sitcom series Dick and the Duchess (1957-58), in which she played the daughter of a British lord, and Patrick O’Neal was her American husband, an insurance investigator working in London.
While The Curse of Frankenstein marked the beginning of a long association between Cushing, Lee and Hammer, Court seemed determined not to be confined to horror.
She and Lee co-starred in the Hammer film The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), about a man who prolongs his life by stealing the youth of others. But she also appeared on television on both sides of the Atlantic in such diverse series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-61), The Third Man (1959), the long-running western hit Bonanza (1960) and Danger Man (1960-61).
Dr Blood’s Coffin (1961), a sort of Cornish Frankenstein, and Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films renewed her association with classic horror and consolidated her position within the genre. During the 1960s she continued working in television, guesting on The Twilight Zone (1964), Dr Kildare (1965) and Mission: Impossible (1967).
She and Walsh were divorced and she married the film director Don Taylor. She retired from films and television in the early 1970s, though she did make a cameo appearance in the third Omen film The Final Conflict (1981).
Taylor died in 1998. Court is survived by three children.
Hazel Court, actress, was born on February 10, 1926. She died on April 15, 2008, aged 82


From The Times
April 19, 2008
Tears for the Scream Queen, Hazel Court

At horror book shops and in gaudily decorated conference centres they will miss her this summer: the prim English lady from Sutton Coldfield who became the “Queen of Scream”.
Hazel Court, who died on Tuesday of a heart attack, aged 82, had a varied career as pin-up, television actress and sculptor. But her loud and bloody roles in a handful of films created a monster cult following that will carry her memory far beyond the grave.
On fan forums the tributes poured in, for she was an icon who deigned to talk to her devotees. “I am truly devastated,” wrote one. “Tears are pouring out of my eyes! I got to become very good friends with her by phone! I could not wait to meet her!”
Another wrote: “This news hit me like a ton of bricks! A love of mine since childhood was watching Hazel strut her stuff in The Raven, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Premature Burial, Masque of the Red Death, and many more. What a loss for us.”
In her final years, four decades after she had retired as a film actress, she still received at least 100 letters a month from her horror fans. Her daughter said that she replied to every one, as well as attending conventions to converse with her following.
Having completed her autobiography, Hazel Court – Horror Queen, she had been eagerly awaited at scores of specialist bookshops across Britain and America and was due at the Monster Bash convention outside Pittsburg this summer.
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.”
A new generation of fans grew up long after her screams had died. Roger Simpson, 27, who runs unofficial-hammerfilms.com, first saw her in a television rerun in the mid1990s. “Fundamentally she was very much of the English rose generation but she was also” – he pauses, choosing his words carefully – “she was also quite voluptuous as well. There is a sexual element to it, that underpins it.”
In The Man Who Could Cheat Death, she played an artist’s model in an opening scene. “In the European version there is a brief glimpse of her topless. It hasn’t been seen since the Sixties, but someone managed to track down some stills and they are very much in demand in the community.”
Bruce Sachs, her publisher, said: “These films were done in the early Sixties as America particularly was entering the psychadelic era. They were just incredible films.”
She was the star of an age when horror film heroines could still be strong characters. “That is the only instance in which she is physically exploited that I am aware of and there was a context for it,” Mr Simpson said. “I think she managed to be the Queen of Scream without being exploited, partly perhaps because she left the business in 1964, but she stayed pure and that was part of her attraction.” The Devil Girl From Mars (1954) was a low-budget classic. Then came colour film, and The Curse of Frankenstein: her red hair and flashing green eyes captivated audiences.
She took the screaming seriously. “One can’t just scream,” she said in 2000. “To give a good scream one has to take an enormous breath, and suck one’s stomach in, and fill one’s lungs and let go.” At conventions, fans impressed by the prim and proper manners of the elderly Court would never have dared to ask her to demonstrate.
Ingrid Pitt, another Hammer horror heroine, would join Court on stage at conventions. “She was the very, very first Hammer star,” she said.
The Hammer company has been bought by private equity investors with plans to revive the brand. Pitt features in their first production, Beyond the Rave, published this week on MySpace. The Queen of Scream may be dead, but the horror legacy lives on.

Originally Posted by hankoler A beautiful lady , did she appear in the film MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH ? RIP.

Originally Posted by batman I think you mean Dear Murderer.