GAYLE HUNNICUTT

(6 February 1943 - 31 August 2023)

The American actress Gayle Hunnicutt, who has died aged 80, enjoyed a career playing beautiful but tough women on film, stage and television. Because of her looks, she was first typecast in decorative roles, but proved to be a versatile actress at home in The Beverly Hillbillies, The Saint and Dallas, and in works by Henry James, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbury. Gayle Hunnicutt was born Virginia Gayle Hunnicutt in Fort Worth, Texas, to Colonel Sam Lloyd Hunnicutt and his wife Mary. She attended the University of California against her family’s wishes, although the director Jean Renoir encouraged her.

She studied theatre at college and was seen by a Hollywood talent spotter. Her first appearance was on TV in Mister Roberts in 1966 which led to Roger Corman’s film The Wild Angels with Peter Fonda as a Harley-Davidson biker and Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern and Dianne Ladd in tow. Hunnicutt then had the female lead in P.J., with George Peppard as the titular private eye. Next came the horror film Eye of the Cat with Michael Sarrazin, and Marlowe with James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe. In 1968 she married the actor David Hemmings and they had a son, Nolan. In 1970 they moved to the UK and co-starred in Richard C. Sarafian’s Fragment of Fear.

Then Hemmings co-wrote and directed Running Scared, a romantic drama with his wife and Robert Powell. They then appeared in Kevin Billington’s psychological drama Voices, but by this time Hunnicutt had made The Golden Bowl, a major BBC series based on the Henry James novel about Prince Amerigo who weds a woman for her money, rather than his poor but beautiful mistress Charlotte Stant (Hunnicutt). In 1974 she played Tsarina Alexandra in Fall of Eagles, another ambitious BBC series on European dynasties with a huge cast.

Michael Winner’s spy film Scorpio with Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon was pretty feeble. Shadowman or Nuits rouges (1974), Georges Franju’s French-Italian crime-thriller, was also disappointing, so by then Hunnicutt’s movie work was not that good, apart from Target, Arthur Penn’s thriller with Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon, and Alan J. Pakula’s Dream Lover with Kirsty McNichol. She appeared on TV in Dylan, about the poet Dylan Thomas, was in Chabrol and Bunuel Jr’s Fantomas, about a master criminal (with Helmut Berger), and played Irene Adler in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett. She was also in Barbara Taylor Bradford’s miniseries A Woman of Substance and for three years played Vanessa Beaumont in Dallas.

Her stage work included Hedda Gabler, Peter Pan and Peter Handke’s Ride Across Lake Contance. Two pieces were more personal, though, The Life and Loves of Edith Wharton, the American writer, at the Hampstead Theatre and on tour; and in The Two Marys she played the feminist revolutionary Mary Wollstonecraft in conversation with the author Mary Shelley.

In 1975 Hunnicutt and Hemmings divorced and in 1978 she married the journalist Simon Jenkins and they had a son, Edward. However, after thirty years they too divorced.

MICHAEL DARVELL