ACTOR STARRED IN ‘TIME MACHINE,’ OTHER FILM, TV ROLES
Yvette Mimieux, who starred as a delicate, vulnerable ingenue 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 Bel Air. She was 80.
Michelle Bega, a family spokeswoman, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
A slender leading lady with blond hair and blue eyes, Mimieux was initially known for playing beautiful but 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 archaeology, which she studied at UCLA before going on digs to Indonesia, among other places.
She was 18 when she rose to prominence in “The Time Machine” (1960), the first Hollywood adaptation of H.G. Wells’s classic sciencefiction novel. Directed by George Pal, the film won the Academy Award for best special effects and starred Rod Taylor as a Victorian time-traveler and Mimieux as his love interest, Weena.
The film received warm reviews and, later that year, Mimieux played a Floridabound spring breaker in the teen comedy “Where the Boys Are,” which explored young people’s changing attitudes toward sex and inspired a slew of beach-party imitators, as well as a 1984 sequel.
Hailed by Life magazine as a “warmly wistful starlet,” she found herself in high demand at Metro-GoldwynMayer studios, which put her under long-term contract. She appeared in four movies in 1962 alone, including “Diamond Head,” as the sister of a Hawaii land baron played by Charlton Heston, and “Light in the Piazza,” an Elizabeth Spencer adaptation in which she played
Olivia de Havilland’s intellectually disabled daughter.
She 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.
Yvette Carmen Mimieux was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 8, 1942.
She last appeared onscreen in “Lady Boss,” a 1992 miniseries, and stayed out of the spotlight in recent years.