Laurie Mitchell
Actress who became a favourite of the drive-in movie generation
LAURIE MITCHELL, who has died aged 90, was an archetypal Hollywood blonde, who during the 1950s came into her own playing in a string of western films and television shows, including Wagon Train, The Virginian, Rawhide and Bonanza. “My agent said I had sex appeal, so I was usually cast as a saloon girl,” she recalled.
Away from the Wild West, she became a favourite of the American drive-in movie generation for her roles in a spate of sci-fi chillers. In Attack of the Puppet People (1958) she fell victim to a deranged puppet-master (played by John Hoyt) who creates a machine to shrink people.
She followed this with the title role in Queen of Outer Space (1958), opposite Zsa Zsa Gabor, about a group of astronauts drawn by a mysterious force to the planet Venus, which they soon discover to be occupied by beautiful women and the tempestuous Queen Yllana.
She was born Mickey Koren in the East Bronx, New York, on July 14 1928, and began her career modelling for advertisers in Manhattan, before moving with her family to Los Angeles, where she took acting lessons and landed some stage work.
She married the magician turned trumpeter Larry White, and won a couple of bit parts billed as Barbara White but after discovering there was already an English actress of the same name settled on “Laurie Mitchell”.
Her big-screen roles included the film noir Women’s Prison (1955), starring Ida Lupino, the steamy Girls in Prison (1956) and the comedy adventure Fighting Trouble (1956).
She played a manicurist in The Female Animal (1957), about an ageing movie star (Hedy Lamarr) and her alcoholic daughter (a change of character for the MGM musical star Jane Powell) competing for the attentions of a handsome film extra.
In 1959 Mitchell took a minor uncredited role as Mary Lou, a trumpeter in Sweet Sue’s Band in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, co-starring Marilyn Monroe. “Oh, Marilyn photographed so beautifully,” she recalled. “She had a dramatic coach with her at all times, and if the coach didn’t like the take, it would be done over and over and over until she approved. This of course only made Marilyn more nervous so she kept repeatedly fluffing her lines, so some scenes were shot quite a number of times.”
The same year Laurie Mitchell joined Steve Mcqueen on the television show Wanted: Dead or Alive. “God love him!” Mitchell recalled. “He was a bit brash and inconsiderate at times and he had a foul mouth, but boy, he was a handsome brute! Everything on the set was ‘f---’ this and ‘f---’ that. Such language doesn’t really shock so many people now, but back then, it was shocking!”
During the 1960s, she was seen more on television than on film, appearing on episodes of 77 Sunset Strip, The Addams Family, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Ironside.
On film, in 1962, she played a showgirl in the Rock Hudson and Doris Day vehicle, That Touch of Mink, and she was the second female lead in Runaway Girl (1965), starring the voluptuous Lili St Cyr, about a wholesome vineyard owner, played by Jock Mahoney, who falls for the enchanting and worldly Edella (Lili St Cyr), much to the anger of his pretty girlfriend Winnie Bernay (Laurie Mitchell). The film won Laurie Mitchell her most favourable reviews.
By the mid-1960s her work was becoming more sporadic, and she retired from acting in the early 1970s to bring up her two children. When Some Like it Hot was released on DVD in 2001, she joined her surviving Sweet Sue bandmates for the accompanying short film.
Laurie Mitchell’s first marriage ended in divorce, and she is survived by her second husband, Ron Roberts, and their two children.
Laurie Mitchell, born July 14 1928, died September 20 2018