Kathleen Hughes, the statuesque 1950s starlet who unleashed a terrifying scream in connection with her role in the 3D sci-fi classic It Came From Outer Space, has died. She was 96.
Hughes died Monday, according to her close friend, John Jigen Griffin-Atil.
A onetime contract player at Fox and then Universal, Hughes made for a “dainty dish of poison,” as New York Times critic Bosley Crowther put it, in her turn as an actress having an affair with John Forsythe in the crime drama The Glass Web (1953), starring Edward G. Robinson.
A year earlier, she dyed her dark hair blonde to star as a coed in For Men Only (1952), directed by and starring Paul Henreid.
Hughes gave Rock Hudson perhaps his first onscreen kiss when she acted with him in a 1949 screen test, then appeared with him as Piper Laurie’s handmaiden in the adventure film The Golden Blade (1953).
She also portrayed a really awful person in Three Bad Sisters (1956). “I just loved the scene where I horsewhipped my sister and sent her sobbing and bleeding into the night where she got into a car and drove off a cliff,” she said in a 2019 interview. “For some reason, it just struck me that it’s very funny.”
Hughes was married for 59 years to writer-producer Stanley Rubin (The Narrow Margin, River of No Return, The President’s Analyst), who died in March 2014 at age 96.
After playing Ann Blyth’s pal in Sally and Saint Anne (1952), Hughes agreed to help test the 3D cameras that were to be employed for Universal’s It Came From Outer Space (1953), inspired by a Ray Bradbury story and starring Richard Carlson and Barbara Rush.
“They asked me if I would mind just walking back and forth on a little runway in a bathing suit, maybe because I was quite three-dimensional [at the time],” she said with a chuckle during a 2012 Film Noir Foundation chat with Alan K. Rode. “So I was happy to do it.”
Hughes wanted a role in the Jack Arnold-directed movie but was told the film already had been cast, but she got a hold of the script and found a part “with one good scene” that she liked. After she “nagged and nagged and nagged” for about a month, she got to portray the girlfriend of Russell Johnson’s human-looking alien.
Later, Hughes was among the actors being photographed for ad stills to promote the movie when she was told to ‘Throw up your hands and scream,’” she said in another chat with Rode, this one in 2017. The photo would take on a life of its own. “The picture has been used for so many things, like ‘Hummus, a flavor that screams’ … One of my cousins was in Canada and saw my picture on a birthday card!”
Her husband put his foot down when her photo was used for a condom advertisement.
Elizabeth “Betty” von Gerkan was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 14, 1928. Her uncle was F. Hugh Herbert, a screenwriter and playwright who created the character of teenager Corliss Archer, played by Shirley Temple in the 1945 Columbia Pictures comedy Kiss and Tell.
“My uncle always told me that I could never be in pictures because I’m too tall,” the 5-foot-9 actress said in 1970. “He said all the leading men are short. I think one of the reasons I stuck to acting was to prove him wrong.”
After graduating from Fairfax High School, she was a student at L.A. City College and appearing in the Maxwell Anderson play Night Over Taos at the Geller Theater on the Miracle Mile (now the site of the Petersen Automotive Museum) when she was approached by a Fox talent scout.
She signed with the studio, then made her big-screen debut in Road House (1948), starring Cornel Wilde and Ida Lupino. She would appear in a handful of Fox films, including Mr. Belvedere Goes to College and the baseball movie It Happens Every Spring, both released in 1949.
Fox dropped her after three years, and after she appeared in Warner Bros.’ I’ll See You in My Dreams (1951), starring Doris Day and Danny Thomas, and Lippert Pictures’ For Men Only, she spent another three years as a contract player at Universal.
Hughes played a producer’s secretary named Mitch on Bracken’s World, a 1969-70 NBC drama set in the world of Hollywood that was produced by her husband, and showed up in a home movie as the wife of Lt. Col. Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson) on a 1973 episode of M*A*S*H.
She also appeared on such other shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, 77 Sunset Strip, The Tall Man, Perry Mason, Bachelor Father, Gomer Pyle, USMC, I Dream of Jeannie and Quincy M.E. and in films like Dawn at Socorro (1954), Cult of the Cobra (1955), The Late Liz (1971) and Revenge (1990).
She was hired to play a “horny woman” who has a love scene with Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987), but her work was left on the cutting-room floor.
Survivors include her three children, Angie, a film music editor; John, a documentary filmmaker; and Michael.
