When her enterprising sister sent Court's photograph to the director Anthony Asquith, he referred her to Ealing Studios for an interview, and she was given a small role in Champagne Charlie (1944), a salute to Edwardian musical halls starring Tommy Trinder and Stanley Holloway. Although her family moved to Sutton Coldfield when she was six months old, she gained her first stage experience with the Birmingham repertory company. Court, she was born in Birmingham in 1926 and set her sights on an acting career at an early age. The daughter of a professional cricketer, G.W. Her engaging performances in such films as Dear Murderer and Holiday Camp have become largely forgotten, however, due to Court's emergence in the Fifties as the star of early Hammer horrors and the stylish Edgar Allan Poe adaptations made by Roger Corman with such horror icons as Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, which made her a cult favourite with fans of the genre and earned her the label "the Queen of Scream". From 1962 to 1972, she appeared frequently on network television series.Pert and pretty, Hazel Court was a versatile actress who for several years was the epitome of the deceptively demure, often spunky, but very English heroine in British films of the Forties. Court eventually relocated to Los Angeles. She also filmed the first of four episodes of " Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Court first visited the United States in 1958, when CBS imported a television series filmed in London, a cross-cultural situation comedy called "Dick and the Duchess," in which she starred with Patrick O'Neal as an English girl married to an American man. Court moved to the couple's vacation home near Alpine Meadows after Taylor's death. They divorced in 1963, and she later married American actor and director Don Taylor, who died in 1998. Over the next decade and a half, she graduated to featured roles and then to leads, marrying her first husband, actor Dermot Walsh, along the way. She began acting on stage as a teenager and first appeared on screen in an uncredited bit part in the 1944 film "Champagne Charlie." Court was born in Sutton Coldfield, outside Birmingham, England, on Feb. She was amazed by and touched by it, and she answered every one." They had a ton of fun, and they didn't take the movies seriously. "She and Vincent were extremely close, and they found humor in everything. "She knew it wasn't serious acting," Walsh said. Her scream-queen roles continued to bring her fan mail - up to 100 letters a month, Walsh said - until her death. In the last two, her best-known films, she co-starred with Vincent Price. But she became best known for showing considerable cleavage and screaming bloody murder in movies like "Devil Girl From Mars" (1954), "The Curse of Frankenstein" (1957), "Doctor Blood's Coffin" (1961) and Roger Corman's treatments of three works by Edgar Allan Poe: "Premature Burial" (1962), "The Raven" (1963) and "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964). Court had a long and varied professional life, including a second career as a sculptor. A redheaded, leggy, green-eyed beauty who was a busy film actress and a pinup girl in England in the 1950s, and who went on to make dozens of guest appearances on American television, Ms.
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