Beverly Garland made her name as the archetypal shock-faced actress of 1950s Hollywood low-budget horror movies before establishing herself as a familiar presence in several US television series.

She played a scientist’s wife who battles a cucumber alien from Venus in Roger Corman’s monster flick It Conquered the World (1956); an escaped convict clad in “prison-issue” denim hotpants wading through the alligator-infested marshlands of Louisiana in Swamp Women (1955), also directed by Corman; and she returned to the bayous of the Deep South as a bride whose groom disappears on their honeymoon only to turn up years later with his skin green and scaly after overdosing on reptile hormones in The Alligator People (1959), which also starred Lon Chaney Jr as a vengeful, hook-handed, drunken Cajun swamp man.

After such heady stuff, moving on to television to play suburban wives and mothers must have seemed just a little prosaic, but it probably paid better. In fact, she made a great impression on 1950s American television by being the first actress to star in the title role of a dramatic series and TV’s first policewoman when she played the New York Police Department officer Casey Jones in Decoy.

She was nominated for an Emmy award for her role as a mother suffering from leukaemia, playing opposite Lee Marvin, in Medic (1954). In 1964 she appeared in the situation comedy The Bing Crosby Show as the great crooner’s wife and later in the decade as Fred MacMurray’s wife in the long-running series My Three Sons.

Beverly Fessenden was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1926 and brought up in Glendale. She made her debut in 1950 in the film noir classic D.O.A as a femme fatale playing opposite Edmond O’Brien, who after a night on the town wakes up with a sore head to be told that his drinks have been spiked with a “luminous toxin” which will kill him in a week.

Garland continued to play a series of tough women who knew how to handle themselves opposite Charles Boyer, David Niven, Clint Eastwood, Frank Sinatra in The Joker is Wild and Humphrey Bogart in Desperate Hours. Other films included Gunslinger (1956), Naked Paradise (1957), Not of This Earth (1957), all directed by Corman, and Where the Red Fern Grows (1974).

“I never considered myself very much of a passive kind of actress,” she said in 1985. “I was never very comfortable in love scenes. Never comfortable playing a sweet, loveable lady.”

Among her other TV credits were episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Remington Steele, Scarecrow and Mrs King, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and 7th Heaven.

She was briefly married to the actor Richard Garland, himself no stranger to the horror genre, viz Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), also directed by Corman, but they were divorced less than four years later, in 1953. In 1960 Garland was married to Fillmore Crank, a property developer who built a Spanish Mission-style hotel in north Hollywood which in a fit of devotion he called Beverly Garland’s Holiday Inn. He died in 1999 but his wife continued to be involved in running the hotel. She served on the boards of the California Tourism Corporation and the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.

Garland is survived by four children.

Beverly Garland, actress, was born on October 17, 1926. She died on December 5, 2008, aged 82