In the 1950s, Mara Corday — a nightclub showgirl and popular pinup model — was a star of three science-fiction thrillers, including “Tarantula” (1955), in which she fled from a 100-foot-tall spider that had escaped from a laboratory.
“The whole world is after him,” Ms. Corday told the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper that year about the terrifying arachnid. “He’s a pretty unhappy spider, I can tell you. I’m a lady scientist, and Leo Carroll and John Agar are playing two top roles.”
At a time when sci-fi cinema was focused on subjects like alien invasions, space exploration and nuclear paranoia, Ms. Corday was cast in B-movie tales about nasty, gigantic creatures.
In 1957, she played a mathematician in “The Giant Claw,” in which a gigantic bird (first thought to be a U.F.O.) tears down buildings and foments panic. She returned that year to outsize insects, as a rancher in “The Black Scorpion,” about giant scorpions threatening the countryside after rising out of a volcanic eruption in Mexico.
While filming on location in Mexico, Ms. Corday discovered a coral snake (presumably of normal size) in her hotel room. Her screams brought a bellboy to her rescue.
“After working with scorpions all day,” she was quoted as saying in Valley Times of North Hollywood, “I’m in no condition to combat snakes at night.”
Ms. Corday — whose movie career stretched from sci-fi and western films in the 1950s to four of her friend Clint Eastwood’s movies decades later — died on Feb. 9 at her home in Valencia, Calif. She was 95.
Her death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed in an obituary published on May 30 in The Washington Post, which obtained her death certificate.
Marilyn Joan Watts was born on Jan. 3, 1930, in Santa Monica, Calif. Her father, Emerson, held several jobs, including chauffeur and auditor; her mother, Shirley (Wood) Watts, was a stenographer.
Marilyn’s show-business career began as a teenager, working as an usher at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles. At 17, she was hired as a showgirl for Earl Carroll’s revue at his Hollywood nightclub.
“I used to say to my mother, ‘I don’t have to go to school because I will marry a movie star,’” Ms. Corday told The Los Angeles Times in 1980. “My mother got fed up. She saw an ad, ‘Looking for New Faces,’ and my mother took me to the tryouts at Earl Carroll’s.”
Marilyn started in the chorus in 1947, but soon graduated to performing skits with the comedian Pinky Lee.
In search of an exotic stage name, she combined Mara — derived from a nickname she was given by a bongo player at the Mayan — and Corday, from the perfume brand.
After Mr. Carroll died in a plane crash in 1948, Ms. Corday danced in Las Vegas shows and acted in a production of Anita Loos’s play “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles in 1950.
She was soon under contract at United-International Pictures. She also modeled in bikinis and other revealing outfits, appearing on the covers of magazines like Tempo, Sir!, Pose!, Modern Man, Picturegoer, Eye and People Today, and was the Playboy Playmate of the Month in October 1958. The Boston Globe reported in 1955 that she was the second most popular pinup model, after Marilyn Monroe, among men in the armed forces.
Through the 1950s, Ms. Corday was featured in numerous films, including “Sea Tiger” (1952); “Money From Home” (1953), with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; and “So This Is Paris” (1954), with Tony Curtis, a story about three American sailors seeking romance while on leave, in which she played Yvonne, a sexy French cashier.
Yvonne, she said, was her favorite role, one for which Universal sent her on a publicity tour. When she returned, she landed the female lead in “The Man From Bitter Ridge” (1955), a western in which she was cast opposite Lex Barker, with whom she became romantically involved. She appeared in major roles in other westerns, including “Raw Edge” and “A Day of Fury” (both in 1956) and “The Quiet Gun” (1957).
Ms. Corday’s screen career slowed after her marriage in 1957 to Richard Long, a fellow actor who starred in the 1960s TV series “The Big Valley.” She said that he did not want her in the business.
In the book “Westerns Women” (1999), by Boyd Magers and Michael G. Fitzgerald, she said that Mr. Long turned down roles she’d been offered — on her behalf, without telling her — including one opposite Fred MacMurray in “The Oregon Trail” (1959) and another in “The Big Valley.”
“I divorced him 10 times the first year of our marriage, getting a lawyer and everything … and 13 times the second year,” she said. “He’d plead, literally on his hands and knees, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t know why I did it, give me another chance.’”
They had a tempestuous marriage, with numerous separations. Mr. Long was jailed in 1961 for beating her, but was released after she refused to sign a complaint against him, according to United Press International.
Mr. Long died in 1974. Ms. Corday’s survivors include a daughter, Valerie Long, and a son, Gregory Long. Another son, Carey, died in 2008.
Ms. Corday’s last credited screen roles were in 1961, until she returned about 15 years later with a small part in an episode of “Joe Forrester,” a TV series starring Lloyd Bridges as a police officer. Around that time, she needed health insurance, and she got a lifeline from Mr. Eastwood, a friend from their time together at United-International. (He had a small role in “Tarantula.”)
“He put her in movies because she didn’t have health insurance, and he also thought she was a good actress,” Ms. Long said last year on the Rarified Heir Podcast, which features interviews with the adult children of celebrities. “He’d say, ‘Why aren’t you working?’”
Mr. Eastwood gave Ms. Corday parts in “The Gauntlet” (1977) and “Sudden Impact” (1983). She also appeared in “Pink Cadillac” (1989) and “The Rookie” (1990).
As Loretta, a waitress in “Sudden Impact,” Ms. Corday became part of cinematic history. After Mr. Eastwood, playing the detective Dirty Harry Callahan, walks into a diner, she pours copious amounts of sugar into his coffee — unlike his usual, no-sugar order — to silently signal that something is wrong: Gunmen are holding the staff and customers hostage.
Reading his newspaper, he is oblivious to her efforts until he leaves the shop, spits out the coffee and returns to complain — and then confronts the gunmen with his Smith & Wesson revolver. He shoots three of them, and when the fourth puts a gun to Ms. Corday’s head, he issues his famous ultimatum: “Go ahead, make my day.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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