Poseidon Adventure’s cult following kept actress afloat as roles dried up
Life Story
Carol Lynley, who has died aged 77, was best known for her starring role in the disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure (1972), in which she also lip-synched the film’s Oscar-winning song The Morning After.
The film, directed by Ronald Neame and produced by Irwin Allen, was set on the ocean liner SS Poseidon, which is overturned by a tidal wave. It became a classic of the genre and paved the way for later Irwin Allen extravaganzas such as The Towering Inferno (1974).
In Poseidon, Lynley played Nonnie, a singer and one of a group of survivors who reunite in the ship’s upturned ballroom to begin their battle for survival.
Dressed in a clinging orange blouse, white hot pants and go-go boots, she spends much of the film climbing through the wreckage, screaming and getting drenched.
Petula Clark was said to have been offered the role, and Cher was rumoured to have been in the running. As it was, Lynley found it exhausting, recalling the scant health and safety provision.
‘‘It was the most physically demanding role you can possibly imagine,’’ she told film critic Roger Ebert in 1972. ‘‘We had to swim underwater, climb across tiny catwalks, walk over flames . . . They hosed us down at least 20 times a day. And there were no safety precautions for the first two weeks of shooting. I’d be up there on a catwalk, and if I slipped, it was six storeys straight down through flames to a concrete floor.’’
Parts of the movie were filmed on a cruise liner, but most of it was shot on a Hollywood sound stage, inside a huge tank that took three days to fill with water. The claustrophobic setting seemed to intensify the egos and fears of the cast. ‘‘Everybody hated something,’’ Lynley told
The Washington Post in 1972. ‘‘I hated the heights. Red Buttons hated the water. Stella [Stevens] hated the dirt and so did Ernest Borgnine. Shelley Winters hated being fat and Jack Albertson hated Shelley Winters.’’ But she also said: ‘‘In hindsight I loved it.’’ She was born Carole Ann Jones in Manhattan. After she left school, her mother found her employment as a child model and, just before her 15th birthday, she featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1957. An accompanying article at the time said: ‘‘To fend off threatening ounces, she limits herself to a spartan two meals a day: tea and grapes for breakfast, steak or fish, icecream and more grapes for dinner.’’
In 1957 Walt Disney cast her for her film debut in his adventure drama The Light in the Forest. But it was James Leo Herlihy’s controversial Broadway play Blue Denim (1958) that catapulted her to stardom. So convincing was she as Janet Willard, a teenager who tries to have an illegal abortion, that she was cast in the same role in the
‘‘It was the most physically demanding role you can possibly imagine . . . In hindsight, I loved it.’’ Carol Lynley, centre, on making The Poseidon Adventure
screen version the following year. However, the play had received criticism from prolife groups, and in the film version Janet goes through with the pregnancy. The role won Lynley a nomination for a Golden Globe as most promising female newcomer.
Thereafter, she was mostly a minor star in minor films. She appeared in a series of lightweight sex romps, such as Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963) with Jack Lemmon and The Pleasure Seekers (1964), about the adventures of three young American women in Spain.
In one of her more challenging dramatic roles, she shared the screen with Laurence Olivier and Noel Coward in Otto Preminger’s 1965 psychological thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing, playing a young mother searching for a lost daughter.
Struggling to find film work when the Hollywood studio contract system ended, she had guest roles on The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, The Big Valley and, in 1972, the TV movie Night Stalker, though she had returned to feature films in 1969 as a psychotic murderess in Once You Kiss a Stranger.
Despite the success of The Poseidon Adventure, she worked mostly on made-for-tv films such as The Elevator (1974), in which she found herself trapped in a high-rise lift. She retired after appearing in Sage Stallone’s film short Vic (2006).
Her marriage in 1960 to producer Michael Selsman ended after four years. Later rumours that she might marry Fred Astaire came to nothing, and she was romantically linked to the broadcaster David Frost for some 20 years. She is survived by a daughter.
Lynley was gratified but puzzled by the continued popularity of The Poseidon Adventure, which inspired a devoted following.
She and other cast members sometimes appeared at gatherings of the film’s fans, many of whom memorised the dialogue, made tribute (and spoof) videos or built elaborate models of the doomed ship.
‘‘The movie has a life of its own. I went through 10 or 15 pairs of shorts because they kept shrinking,’’ she told the New York Times. ‘‘At the end of it, we had the choice of taking our costumes home. But after three and a half months, you don’t want them.’’
She came to regret her decision. ‘‘I could sell them on ebay for a fortune.’’ – Washington Post/telegraph Group