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Hazel Court: The Times obituary
Actress who found her forte with period horror movies and was dubbed the 'scream queen'
With her piercing scream and what was once described as a “panoramic cleavage”, Hazel Court epitomised the “scream queen” of horror movies in the 1950s and 1960s, first in her native England with Hammer and then in the United States, working with Roger Corman.
She played Frankenstein’s cousin and fiancée, Elizabeth, in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the film that first brought together Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and began Hammer’s series of landmark period horror movies. It also marked the studio’s move into colour, which made the most of Court’s red hair and green eyes.
In the United States she had starring roles in Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The Premature Burial (1962), opposite Ray Milland, The Raven (1963), with Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and the young Jack Nicholson, and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
This last is perhaps Corman’s masterpiece and has been compared with the style of Ingmar Bergman. Court and Price are aristocratic devil-worshippers in medieval Italy, instructing a young, innocent peasant girl, played by Jane Asher, in diabolism, while death stalks the land.
Ultimately Court became a celebrated figure with fans of the genre and she spent about ten years working on an autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen (Tomahawk Press), which is published next week, just days after her death at her home at Lake Tahoe, California.
Despite her status with horror fans, she had been in films for more than ten years before The Curse of Frankenstein and was groomed as a leading lady at Gainsborough in the 1940s.
She was born in Birmingham in 1926, the daughter of a cricketer, G. W. Court, who played for Willington. She landed a small role in her first film, the Ealing movie Champagne Charlie (1944), largely by chance. Her sister, Audrey, met the film director Anthony Asquith and the studio executive Norman Loudon socially and happened to show them a picture of Hazel.
According to Court’s autobiography Asquith’s response was to say, “She should be in films”. Court had, however, attended drama school in London and done some theatre before her film debut. She also admits in the new book that she began an affair with Loudon, despite a huge difference in their ages.
Early films ranged from melodrama to comedy, including Holiday Camp (1947), an instalment in the popular series about the Huggett family. She played Phyllis Calvert’s sister in the 1947 melodrama Root of All Evil and co-starred with Dermot Walsh in the 1948 murder mystery My Sister and I. They were married the following year and worked together again in Ghost Ship (1952) and several other films.
But during the 1950s Court slipped into B-movies, including, most notably, Devil Girl from Mars (1954), and she also accepted work on television before Frankenstein revived her career.
Her profile was boosted at about the same time by the sitcom series Dick and the Duchess (1957-58), in which she played the daughter of a British lord, and Patrick O’Neal was her American husband, an insurance investigator working in London.
While The Curse of Frankenstein marked the beginning of a long association between Cushing, Lee and Hammer, Court seemed determined not to be confined to horror.
She and Lee co-starred in the Hammer film The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), about a man who prolongs his life by stealing the youth of others. But she also appeared on television on both sides of the Atlantic in such diverse series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958-61), The Third Man (1959), the long-running western hit Bonanza (1960) and Danger Man (1960-61).
Dr Blood’s Coffin (1961), a sort of Cornish Frankenstein, and Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films renewed her association with classic horror and consolidated her position within the genre. During the 1960s she continued working in television, guesting on The Twilight Zone (1964), Dr Kildare (1965) and Mission: Impossible (1967).
She and Walsh were divorced and she married the film director Don Taylor. She retired from films and television in the early 1970s, though she did make a cameo appearance in the third Omen film The Final Conflict (1981).
Taylor died in 1998. Court is survived by three children.
Hazel Court, actress, was born on February 10, 1926. She died on April 15, 2008, aged 82
Hazel Court's long and diverse career was often eclipsed by her spinechillers, because she became so successful in those films, for both Hammer and American-International. That said, the actress was unfailingly gracious and warm about her time making those films, never giving the impression she was weary of being described as a ‘horror queen’. She always managed to inject depth and emotion into her characters, even when a role was less developed in the script than those of her male co-stars. She gave an edge to characters who at first appeared passive, or sometimes submissive, and brought a touch of steel to her roles. Court was the only atress to star alongside all the masters of macabre cinema, and was clearly a popular colleague: Vincent Price encouraged, supported and commissioned her artwork and through that she enjoyed a new lease of creativity and joy. Her passing is particularly poignant as Court’s autobiography is scheduled for publication in a few days her in the UK.
Martin Thomas, Torquay,