Vale: Stella Stevens

She died on Friday in Los Angeles following a long illness.

Performing as a leading lady in 1960s and 70s comedies she got her big break in Li’l Abner in 1959.

After winning the New Star Golden Globe, and featuring as a Playboy Playmate of the Month her credits included Girls! Girls! Girls!, Too Late Blues, and The Nutty Professor.

“Jerry Lewis had told the bosses at Paramount he wanted to cast the most beautiful ingenue working at the studio — or something like that — and so I got the gig,” she said.

“We all tried to make the characters he had created in the script special, wonderful, unique — and if you ask me, I do believe that’s why the film still holds up after all those years.”

She would appear in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Secret of My Success, The Silencers, Where Angels Go Trouble Follows, Slaughter, The Poseidon Adventure, Trouble Follows, and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and in which she played the wife of Ernest Borgnine’s character.

She appeared in the pilots for Wonder Woman, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat plus series credits in Night Court, Murder She Wrote, Magnum, P.I., Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bonanza, Newhart, Fantasy Island, Flamingo Road, Highway to Heaven, Night Court, Murder She Wrote, Santa Barbara, The Commish, Burke’s Law, Highlander: The Series, Silk Stalkings, General Hospital, In Cold Blood

Source: ABC, Wikipedia