Hazel Court, the British leading lady whose flashing green eyes, curvacious figure and healthy screams made her an indispensible highlight in such fine '60s horrors as The Premature Burial and The Masque of the Red Death, died of a heart attack on April 15 at her Lake Tahoe home. She was 82.

She was born on February 10, 1926, in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, England. She was acting in theatre productions when, at the age of 18, she was discovered by a talent agent from the J. Arthur Rank Organisation - the premier movie organization in the '40s; Rank owned several movie studios and over 600 movie houses across the UK at the time. She was given the "Rank treatment," a grooming-for-stardom phase that many beautiful ingenues experienced who were under contract to the studio (including Honor Blackman and Diana Dors). Court eventually worked her way up to leading lady status.

Her first few films were either light comedies: Dreaming (1945), Carnival (1946), Holiday Camp (1947); or darker fare: Meet Me at Dawn (1947), Forbidden (1948). While these films were moderate domestic hits, Court's career didn't really take off until the '50s when she starred in some great British cult flicks such as Devil Girl from Mars (1954), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) and she even had her own sitcom for a brief season with Dick and the Duchess (1957-58), opposite Patrick O'Neal.

The most fruitful part of her career came when she hooked up with director Roger Corman to star in a trio of critical and commercial film adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe: Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), and of course, her brilliantly intense performance as the needful Juliana, a woman whose affections for Prince Prosepero (Vincent Price) would not be denied in The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Wisely, Court augmented her growing cinematic fame with many appearances on American television shows, adding grace as she guest starred on 12 O'Clock High, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Wild, Wild West.

Court faded from public view shortly thereafter, and with the exception of a few spots on the small screen in the early '70s - McMillan & Wife, The Name of the Game, Court concentrated on raising a family (she had married American actor Don Taylor in 1964). Sadly, she died just before her memoirs, Hazel Court - Horror Queen, were to be released. Don Taylor died in 1998, and Court is survived by daughters Sally (from her first marriage to British actor Dermot Walsh) and Courtney; a son, Jonathan; and stepdaughters Anne and Avery.

by Michael T. Toole