Anne Kimbell
Actress who gave up a flourishing career to travel the world and later became a thriller writer
ANNE KIMBELL, who has died aged 84, was a Hollywood actress who starred in the cult film-maker Roger Corman’s first Sci-fi movie Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954) and appeared on stage with Marlon Brando, but gave up acting soon after she met and married a US Foreign Service officer while she was working in London.
She went on to travel extensively with her husband, founded a school for women in the Republic of Chad and set up an education programme for Tunisian high schools. She later wrote several successful thrillers including To Catch a Spy (2000), The Ibeji Twins (2004) and Assignment Paris (2010).
Anne Kimbell was born on June 28 1932 in Queen Anne, Maryland, but the family moved to Hollywood when she was three. The following year her mother found her acting work on the “Children’s Radio Workshop”. At the age of 12 she joined the Screen Actors Guild as one of its youngest members.
Aged 13 she played Rosalind Russell’s daughter in Roughly Speaking (1945), and in 1947 she appeared in Mother Wore Tights about a vaudevillian (Betty Grable), who is intent on going to business school but ends up in the chorus. There were also roles in Summer Holiday, with Mickey Rooney and Gloria De Haven, the ill-advised Bette Davis comedy June
Bride (both 1948), Wagon’s West (1952) and The Golden Idol (1954) with Johnny
Sheffield.
But her most memorable role of the 1950s was in Monster from the Ocean Floor, in which she played Julie Blair, an American tourist who comes across a one-eyed, man-eating, radioactive super-amoeba while on holiday in Mexico. In 1954 she also appeared in The Flaming Torch, a biopic starring, as himself, the American Olympian Bob Mathias, the first man to win two Olympic gold medals in the decathlon, and The Golden Idol, in which she starred opposite Johnny Sheffield who played Bomba the Jungle Boy.
Anne Kimbell’s career flourished during the 1950s, mostly in popular television shows. She then moved to New York where she studied at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio and focused on her stage work.
In 1953 she toured with Marlon Brando, who was playing Sergius in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1953), and two years later she joined Eddie Bracken and Tom Ewell on stage in The Seven Year Itch. She played the showgirl in The Sleeping Prince (1958) and then travelled to London, where she performed in Lesley Storm’s comedy Roar Like a Dove (1958) at the Phoenix Theatre.
While she was in London she met and married James Relph, who was working for the US Foreign Service. She then appeared in the 1958 comedy film Girls at Sea, in which Richard Briers made his debut, as well as two plays for the BBC.
The Kimbells moved to Switzerland, then Germany, before a spell in Africa. Her life as Mrs Relph provided her with much material for a series of books – the most successful of which was To Catch a Spy. She was also co-author, with Karen Wilson, of How to Communicate with Difficult People: A Survival Guide for the Office and Life (1989).
The Relphs settled in California during the 1980s but later divorced. Anne Kimbell then served as an executive director of the University of Southern California. A decade later, on a sojourn in Colorado, she saved the historic Jones Theatre – which had been deserted and abandoned – from being turned into a launderette. She was serving as the theatre’s president and artistic director at the time of her death.
She is survived by a daughter.