She had `the stamina and energy of an athlete'

Yvette Mimieux, who starred in early 1960s movies such as The Time Machine, Where the Boys Are and Light in the Piazza, and who later sought to break out of typecasting by creating her own roles as a TV writer and producer, died Monday at her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. She was 80.

Michelle Bega, a family spokeswoman, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.

Mimieux was initially known for playing passive young women — submissive daughters, students, girlfriends and wives whose lives were shaped primarily by their mothers or romantic partners. “She seems to be the embodiment of fragile femininity,” Family Weekly declared in 1968.

Yet off-screen, “nothing could be further from the truth,” the magazine continued, describing Mimieux as “a loner, a truly rugged individualist” who possessed “the stamina and energy of an athlete.” Her interests extended to ballet, chess, painting, literature, motorcycles, aviation and archeology, which she studied at the University of California at Los Angeles before going on digs to Indonesia, among other places.

Mimieux often lamented the lack of complex film roles for women, telling the Los Angeles Times, “There's nothing to play. They're either sex objects or vanilla pudding.”

She generally found richer material on television, starring as a criminologist in The Most Deadly Game, a short-lived series from producer Aaron Spelling, and as a thriving department store executive in Berrenger's, an NBC soap opera. In 1964, she played a surfer who has seizures and charms Richard Chamberlain in a celebrated two-part episode of Dr. Kildare.

Yvette Carmen Mimieux was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 8, 1942. Her mother was Mexican, and her father was French. He worked as an extra in Hollywood movies before trading show business for a job at an electronics firm. Mimieux modelled in Hollywood and was discovered around age 15 by publicist Jim Byron, who had previously promoted Jayne Mansfield.

Her first marriage, to Evan Harland Engber, ended in divorce, as did her 13-year marriage to Stanley Donen, the director of Hollywood musicals such as Singin' in the Rain. In 1986, she married corporate housing magnate Howard F. Ruby. He survives her, as do a brother, a sister and five stepchildren.

Yvette Mimieux