The British-born actress Hazel Court has died at the age of 82, at her home near Lake Tahoe. A leggy redhead with a figure made for period gowns, Ms. Court had a face of such unearthly perfection that, were she young and working today, she would probably be given the honor, along with a few other supernaturally beautiful women, of competing for the romantic attentions of some flabby loser in a movie that has Judd Apatow's name in the credits. Instead, she was a pin-up queen and became a familiar face on TV, but is best remembered for work in horror films by Hammer Studios--The Curse of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee--and Roger Corman during his Edgar Allan Poe phase. She co-starred with Vincent Price in three of the latter, Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Raven, a very strange comic take on the material that must have taken its main inspiration from Corman's having managed to get Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff on the same set at a time when he also happened to have film in the camera. (The cast was rounded out by the young Jack Nicholson, who in this company got to pass for The Normal One.) In one of its few actual links to the poem that is its credited source material, the movie also cast Ms. Court as "Lenore", the lost love of the hero (Price), who turns out to not in fact be dead but to have run off with an older, more powerful wizard (Karloff). The best thing about The Raven may be that it gave Ms. Court, who spend an awful lot of her time in these movies standing around looking gorgeous waiting for the chance to need rescuing, a chance to be regal and bitchy--at one point, she laughs enchantingly while Karloff threatens her own daughter with a red-hot poker--in a way that left a lasting impression on many a young movie-watching poetry enthusiast.

Hazel Court was married to the Irish actor Dermot Walsh for fourteen years, from 1949 until their divorce in 1963. A year later, she married the American actor, Don Taylor, who set met on the set of one of the four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and who she was with until his death in 1998. After remarrying, Court retired from movies to focus on her family, as well as to develop a second career as a sculptor. She also wrote her autobiography, which is to published, under the title Hazel Court Horror Queen, later this year. Her very last film appearance was in a bit part in the third film in The Omen series, 1981's The Final Conflict, where her character is listed by IMDB as "Champagne Woman at Hunt." "Champagne Woman" wouldn't have been a bad superhero name for Hazel Court.