YVETTE MIMIEUX
(8 January 1942 – 17 January 2022)
The American actress Yvette Mimieux, who has died at the age of 80, was a leading lady in films and television for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, but hardly ever secured many major roles that would test her professional abilities. She was generally cast in sensitive, soulful roles, women who were wounded in some way, but she never quite made it as a particularly huge star. However, after she quit acting, she achieved great success as a businesswoman in real estate and other enterprises and pursuits.
She was born Yvette Carmen Mimieux in Hollywood to her Mexican mother Maria del Carmen Montemayor Gonzalez, and her English-born father Rene Albert Mimieux, who was of French and German extraction and an occasional extra in Hollywood movies. Film publicist Jim Byron suggested that Yvette, as a beautiful young woman, should take up acting, and she made her first (uncredited) appearance in A Certain Smile (1958) with Rossano Brazzi and Joan Fontaine. Then, after a couple of television appearances, she was in Platinum High School with Mickey Rooney. Her first major role was in The Time Machine (1960), George Pal's version of the H.G. Wells novel. She was underage at the time but as her acting improved during the shoot, the makers went back and re-filmed some of her earlier scenes.
Director Vincente Minnelli was so impressed by her stage acting that he cast her in Home from the Hill with Robert Mitchum and Eleanor Parker, but her part was cut out of the final edit. Nevertheless, MGM gave her a long-term contract and she appeared in Where the Boys Are with George Hamilton who also played opposite Mimieux in Guy Green's Light in the Piazza in which the actress played a girl of 26 with a mental disability who falls in love while on holiday in Italy. She gave a sensitive performance in what could have been a rather maudlin role. Minnelli used Mimieux again for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and she went on to make The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, playing the Dancing Princess, in a cast including Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom and Karlheinz Böhm.
After Diamond Head with Charlton Heston and George Chakiris came Toys in the Attic, based on the play by Lillian Hellman which has Dean Martin and his new fragile bride (Yvette Mimieux) visiting his two sisters (Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller) in New Orleans where an incestuous family feud ignites. After this there were mainly genre pictures for Mimieux except perhaps for The Picasso Summer in which she and Albert Finney go to France in search of the painter Pablo from a screenplay by Ray Bradbury. After that it was mainly television material with just an occasional film such as Skyjacked (1972), a flying disaster movie with Charlton Heston, or Jackson County Jail (1976) with Tommy Lee Jones, or The Black Hole, Disney's space drama with Maximilian Schell and Anthony Perkins (1979).
During the 1980s it was virtually all television for Mimieux - The Love Boat, Lime Street, Berrenger's, Perry Mason and Jackie Collins' Lady Boss, her last appearance in 1992. Meanwhile the actress had gone into business with Sara Shane, another ex-MGM veteran herself, and they formed Partners in Paradise, a firm specialising in embroidery items based on patterns from Haiti. That and her interest in real estate kept Mimieux busy when she wasn't studying anthropology, archaeology and painting. She had also done some writing of short stories and journalism and even wrote a film thriller which became the television movie Hit Lady in 1974.
Yvette Mimieux first married and divorced Evan Harland Engber and later was married to the film director Stanley Donen from 1972 to 1985 and then she married the National Geographic photographer Howard Ruby from 1986 until her death. There were no children.
MICHAEL DARVELL