Actress best known for Star Trek role
Hollywood ‘scream queen’ eventually became university associate professor
Celeste Yarnall, who has died at 74, was an actress who made her name during the 1960s, primarily on television, where she set pulses racing guest-starring on Star Trek.
In the episode The Apple (1967), Chekov (Walter Koenig) falls in love with her as Yeoman Martha Landon on the USS Enterprise.
In 1968 she appeared in one of Elvis Presley’s last musical comedies, Live a Little, Love a Little.
That film is notable for its attempt to keep up with the times with a quasi-psychedelic sequence in which Presley’s cool photographer embraces a woman in the surf before the scene dissolves to show him dancing in a turquoise suit to a studio backing of iridescent flashing lights.
Yarnall played the supporting role of Ellen, a mini-skirted blond with an interest in astrology whom Elvis tries to impress by breaking into song with A Little Less Conversation.
Interviewed by the fan website Elvis Australia in 2015, Yarnall recalled watching coverage of Martin Luther King ’s assassination in Presley’s dressing room. “Elvis sang Amazing Grace to me,” she said. “And he sobbed in my arms.”
In 1968, she also took the title role of The Face of Eve (renamed Eve), playing a bikini-clad jungle woman who is Christopher Lee’s long-lost grand-daughter.
Those two movies secured her cult status, despite the fact that Eve has been hailed as one of the worst films of all time.
Yarnall was born on July 26, 1944 in Long Beach, Calif.
After school she embarked on a career as a model and actress, and after a chance encounter with the band leader Ozzie Nelson and his teenage son Ricky as she was en route to an audition, her career took off.
In 1962 she was given a guest spot in the sitcom featuring the Nelson family, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
It caught the eye of Jerry Lewis, who gave her a small role in The Nutty Professor (1963).
She followed this in the same year with bit parts in the Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward romantic comedy A New Kind of Love, and Under the Yum Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon.
In 1964 she became the last Miss Rheingold, after receiving 20 million votes from beer drinkers, and headed East to promote New York’s popular “extra dry” lager beer.
Returning to Hollywood in 1965, she found work on such TV shows as The Wild Wild West, Bewitched and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
A trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 earned her the Foreign Press Corps’ Most Photogenic Beauty of the Year award and the National Association of Theatre Owners naming her The Most Promising New Star of 1968.
Her role as Eve did little to enhance her credibility as a serious actress, but she joined the list of illustrious Hollywood “scream queens” with stirring roles in Eddie Romero’s Beast of Blood (1970), and The Velvet Vampire (1971) made by Roger Corman’s company.
Her other work included Michael Winner’s 1972 hitman thriller The Mechanic with Charles Bronson; and Winner’s spy film Scorpio (1973) starring Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.
After that, Yarnall retreated to bring up her daughter from a short-lived marriage to Sheldon Silverstein, before setting up as a real estate agent.
In the 1990s she attempted an acting comeback, appearing on TV in episodes of Knots Landing and Melrose Place, as well as taking small roles in such films as Leonard Nimoy’s Funny About Love (1990).
She studied for a PhD in Nutrition and became an associate professor at Pacific Western University. She worked as a screenwriters’ agent and remained active on the festival circuit, particularly anything related to Star Trek.
She was one of two dozen former Trekkers in the 2018 parody Unbelievable !!!!!
Yarnall is survived by her husband Nazim Artist, who she married in 2010, and her daughter.