Actress in ‘Peter Gunn’

Lola Albright, an alluring actress who was perhaps best known for her role as a sultry nightclub singer in the noirish television detective series “Peter Gunn,” diedMarch 23 in Los Angeles. Shewas 92.

Albright made her screen debut in the late 1940s and appeared in numerous westerns and other B movies before being cast in “Peter Gunn,” an adult drama that aired from1958 to 1961.

The series, created by director Blake Edwards, starred Craig Stevens in the title role as a debonair detective, with Albright playing his often-stood-up girlfriend, Edie Hart. She crooned a song in each episode at a shabby-chic jazz club calledMother’s, which never seemed to close. (In the show’s final season, Edie had her own club.)

Albright was nominated foranEmmyAwardfor “Peter Gunn,” which had a striking theme song that won two Grammy Awards for its composer, Henry Mancini. Albright’s languorous singing and beauty contributed to the moody aura of “Peter Gunn,” which ran for 114 episodes on NBC and later ABC.

“She was perfect casting for that role because she had an off-the-cuff kind of jazz delivery that was very hard to find,” Mancini said in 1992. “Just enough to believe that she’d be singing in that club and that she shouldn’t be on Broadway or doingmovies.”

Beyond the formulaic westernsandscience fiction movies, Albright was often cast as a femme fatale, including as a lusty married woman pursuing Kirk Douglas in the 1949 boxing movie “Champion.” She played a beauty pageant contestant with a driven mother in “Beauty on Parade” (1950). In1955, she appearedas one of Frank Sinatra’s many love interests in “The Tender Trap.”

One of the few times she was cast in the leading role came in 1961 with “A Cold Wind in August,” an edgy drama directed by Alexander Singer.

Albright portrayed an aging stripper, Iris Hartford, who seduces a teenage boy.

Her marriages toWarren Dean, actor Jack Carson and musician and restaurant owner Bill Chadney ended in divorce.

“I was blinded by her beauty,” Carson once said, “and realized we both had made a mistake.”

Survivors include a stepdaughter from her third marriage.

Albright had occasional TVroles into the mid-1980s, then retired to a life of semiseclusion.