CAROL LYNLEY

(13 February 1942 - 3 September 2019)

The American actress Carol Lynley, who has died from a heart attack aged 77, started her working life as a child model for the Sears, Roebuck Company in New York. As a teenager she appeared in television series until her first film, Walt Disney’s The Light in the Forest (1958) with Fess Parker. She had appeared on Broadway in the play Blue Jeans as a young girl finding herself pregnant, so she also made the film version, co-starring with the young Brandon De Wilde. The same year, 1959, also saw her in Holiday for Lovers with Jane Wyman and Clifton Webb. Her career continued with a mix of film and TV work, including Don Siegel’s Hound Dog Man with Fabian, Return to Peyton Place, as Alison Mackenzie, Robert Aldrich’s The Last Sunset, with Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Woman of Summer with Joanne Woodward, Under the Yum Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon, and Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal. She worked with Preminger again on Bunny Lake Is Missing, a mystery story filmed in Britain. Other films she graced were Shock Treatment, The Pleasure Seekers and Harlow in which Lynley played a version of the 1930s star Jean Harlow. The Shuttered Room was David Greene’s horror film shot in Britain with Oliver Reed and Gig Young. Danger Route was one of Seth Holt’s last films, a spy story with Richard Johnson. After more television work, Carol Lynley’s career comprised mostly second-rate films and TV movies, apart from The Poseidon Adventure, a remake of The Cat and the Canary, and a version of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, with Jack Palance. Carol Lynley married and divorced the actor-producer Michael Selsman with whom she has a daughter, Jill.

MICHAEL DARVELL