Margia Dean, beauty queen and actress who worked with Clint Eastwood and Vincent Price – obituary
Margia Dean, who has died aged 101, was a former Miss California who enjoyed a solid career in Hollywood from the tail-end of the Second World War until the end of the 1950s; her best-known role on this side of the Atlantic was as the wife of an astronaut infested by an alien in Val Guest’s 1955 horror adventure, The Quatermass Xperiment, starring Brian Donlevy, which became something of a cult favourite (it was released in the US as The Creeping Unknown).
She was born Marguerite Louise Skliris, in Chicago on April 7 1922, one of three daughters to a prominent Greek lawyer; her parents had moved from Athens almost a decade before. The family then went to San Francisco, where nine-year-old Marguerite – or Margia, as she was known – began treading the boards.
She acted with the Henry Duffy Players and the Reginald Travers Repertory Company, playing Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, and often appearing alongside Bea Benaderet, who later voiced Betty Rubble in The Flintstones.
Aged 15, she won the Women’s National Shakespeare Contest as the heroine in Romeo and Juliet. She began entering beauty contests, winning the Miss San Francisco and Miss California titles, and in 1939 she finished fourth in the Miss America contest.
Modelling work in New York followed, as well as an offer to join a Broadway revue, but her parents beckoned her home to finish high school; that year she married her teenage sweetheart Hal Fischer.
By the early 1940s, Margia Dean had returned to the stage, performing in local theatre in Los Angeles, and she was spotted by a talent scout from Republic Pictures, with whom she made her screen debut as a dancing queen in the 1944 comedy Casanova in Burlesque (for which she took the name Margia Dean).
A bit part followed the same year as a waitress in the action-adventure Call of the South Seas, while in the crime drama Delinquent Daughters (aka Accent on Crime) she played a schoolgirl whose friend commits suicide. But Republic declined to tie her down to a contract, so she went freelance, and made a string of low-budget films for Lippert Pictures.
Robert Lippert owned a cinema chain, and when the major studios dialled down their production of cheap films, he saw a gap in the market. Margia Dean became known as “the Lippert Queen”, making more than a dozen films for him, many of them Westerns, such as I Shot Jessie James, Sam Fuller’s directorial debut, in which she plays a saloon-bar chanteuse, Stagecoach to Fury, Badlands of Montana, Ambush at Cimarron Pass (which featured a young Clint Eastwood) and Red Desert, in which she had a leading role.
She kept working for Lippert into the 1950s, finding herself in a clinch with Vincent Price in another Sam Fuller Western, The Baron of Arizona, but by the end of the decade she had tired of low-budget fare and decided to move behind the camera, working as an executive producer on the western The Long Rope (1961) and as associate producer on The Horror of it All (1964). She moved to England briefly, producing a handful of independent films and TV shows.
When she retired from acting in the 1960s, Margia Dean opened a dress shop, The Pink Parasol, in Brentwood, a suburb of Los Angeles, and a cafe off the fashionable Rodeo Drive which was frequented by A-listers such as James Stewart and Fred Astaire.
After her first marriage ended in divorce in 1945, her name was linked to a string of actors and international playboys, including Prince Aly Khan after his divorce from Rita Hayworth. In 1965, she married Felipe Alvarez, an architect and sometime actor and singer.
In old age, she continued to attend film festivals and correspond with fans. On the eve of her 100th birthday, she wrote to one: “Why don’t you email me? It is so much quicker.”
Margia Dean is survived by her husband.
Margia Dean, born April 7 1922, died June 23 2023
