LOLA ALBRIGHT

(20 July 1925 - 23 March 2017)

The American actress Lola Albright started out as a model and radio station receptionist. She studied piano and singing and recorded some albums when playing a nightclub singer in the TV series Peter Gunn. Her film debut was in The Unfinished Dance in 1947 with Margaret O’Brien and Cyd Charisse. She had other uncredited roles at MGM before landing a good role in Champion (1949) with Kirk Douglas. She was in Tulsa with Susan Hayward and played in several minor films before entering television in Armstrong Circle Theatre in 1951. More television and some B-films kept her busy until Budd Boetticher’s The Brave and the Beautiful (aka The Magnificent Matador) with Anthony Quinn in 1955. Then there was The Tender Trap with Frank Sinatra, more TV and more B-westerns until 1961 and A Cold Wind in August in which she showed how good an actress she was, playing a stripper who seduces an innocent young man. She was a great success in Peter Gunn on TV and appeared with Elvis in Kid Galahad, with Alain Delon in The Love Cage, with Tuesday Weld in Lord Love a Duck, with Kirk Douglas again in The Way West and Doris Day in Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? Then it was mostly back to television until retirement in 1984. She was married and divorced three times, her second husband being the actor Jack Carson.

MICHAEL DARVELL