Cult Hero: Now that the new version of The Time Machine is imminent (it's released next Friday), you'd be forgiven for not having a clue who Yvette Mimieux is, but as the original 1960 movie is bound to pop up on the small screen soon, perhaps you should keep an eye out for the pretty futuristic being who tends to the sick time traveller.
Although Mimieux's role has been extended for Samantha Mumba in the new movie, it's a salutary reminder how initial starlet status can be extremely difficult to transcend.
Born in Hollywood, California, on January 8th, 1942, Mimieux was in her late teens as the 1960s came into view. She was the right age living in the right time and the right place, a lithe blond whose acting skills weren't the best but whose abilities, noted the MGM executives who signed her in 1959 after they viewed several of her modelling sessions, amounted to looking good in a bikini and/or toga and "delivering a good blank expression". Before The Time Machine, she featured in several teen movies that situated her in a sandy beach environment. The likes of Teen Scene and Where The Boys Are (a beach movie that aficionados recognise as a classic of the genre) didn't stretch her acting talents too much, and she soon became known as the archetypal beach babe, making the cover of Life magazine not once but twice.
Although her career post-Time Machine was steady, as the decade became more culturally and socially politicised the demand for actresses with good blank expressions began to wane. Come the 1970s, Mimieux appeared in many average television movies and series (including The Delta Factor and Skyjacked). Like many before her, she also ventured into recording - her album of Indian music accompanying the poetry of Charles Baudelaire is now a collector's item.
In the mid-1970s, she wrote and starred in her own movie, Hit Lady, in which she played an artist by day and an assassin by night. It was a case of too little, too late in the acting arena, however. Although her alluring good looks kept her ambiguously ageless, she will always be remembered as "good victim material". According to a cynical, arguably insulting profile of her: "there's an engaging, simple quality about her that would often cause her to be cast as a sweetly sexy but slightly retarded young woman".
Such an ultimately damning description didn't keep a good woman down, though. In the 1970s, Mimieux married Hollywood film director Stanley Donen (director of Singing In The Rain, Charade, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Funny Face), while over the past 10 years she has branched out with another small-screen venture - her very own instructional health and fitness yoga videos. It's all ahead of you, Samantha.
Tony Clayton-Lea