Lori Nelson, glamorous starlet pursued by Gill-man in Revenge of the Creature – obituary
Lori Nelson, who has died aged 87, was a Hollywood actress best known as the love interest of the monster in the 1955 movie Revenge of the Creature (“Thrills! Shock! Suspense!”), a sequel to the cult hit Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).
Hollywood never found it necessary to explain why its monsters tend to lust after human females, or why the women involved are usually blonde and, preferably, scantily clad.
Be that as it may, the storyline of Revenge featured handsome scientist John Bromfield in “a tributary of the Upper Amazon” looking for the half fish-half human “Gill-man” who made his debut in the earlier film.
After finding the creature, he brings him back to a Florida aquarium from which he inevitably escapes and chases young female scientist Dr Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson) and kidnaps her, dragging her along the beach while Florida good-guy John Agar chases after both of them.
“It is always a treat to see Lori Nelson,” wrote one reviewer after the film was reissued on DVD, “and here she’s given a fabulous ‘50s wardrobe that includes a funny little cap, a polka-dot dress and multi-strap high heels”.
Otherwise the film was chiefly notable for the first screen appearance of Clint Eastwood as a lab assistant who has mislaid a mouse. (His next role was in Francis in the Navy, in which the star was a talking mule.)
In 2005 Lori Nelson reprised her role in the horror spoof The Naked Monster, teaming up with other 1950s monster movie stars to destroy a monster threatening Los Angeles.
She was born Dixie Kay Nelson in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 15 1933 and by the age of two-and-a-half was an accomplished dancer billed as “Santa Fe’s Shirley Temple”. When she was four the family moved to the San Fernando Valley, California where she was quickly dubbed “Little Miss America”.
Aged 17, she signed an extended contract with Universal, appearing in a couple of Ma and Pa Kettle comedies and various Westerns, including Bend of the River (1952), with Rock Hudson. She costarred with Tony Curtis in The All American (1953) and was a boat owner in Underwater! (1954).
She claimed that Howard Hughes had wanted her for the lead and paid Universal Pictures for her use; however, the lead was given to Jane Russell (“Skin Diver Action – Jane Russell as you’ve never seen her before”), who owed RKO a film, with a part written for Lori Nelson so she could keep her fee.
Other supporting roles included the low-budget Day the World Ended (1955), in which she was carried off in her high heels by a three-eyed mutant humanoid, and the comedy Western Pardners (1956), with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Martin.
She also had roles in Destry (1954), a remake of Destry Rides Again, and I Died a Thousand Times, a 1955 remake of High Sierra.
By the late 1950s, she was freelancing in B-movie juvenile delinquent melodramas and exploitation movies, among them Hot Rod Girl (1956), a film so low-budget, she recalled, that the producers wanted her to drive her own car.
In Untamed Youth (1957) she was one of two sisters arrested for hitchhiking and skinny-dipping and sentenced to farm labour. She appeared the same year in the Western Outlaw’s Son, with a lurid poster featuring the strapline “C’mon Cowboy – Let’s See How Tough You Are Without That Gun Belt!”
But with film roles growing scarce, she turned increasingly to television, appearing in Westerns, in the 1957 musical television special The Pied Piper of Hamelin, and co-starring with Barbara Eden in the 1957 series How to Marry a Millionaire.
In 1960 Lori Nelson married Johnny Mann, with whom she had two daughters. The marriage was dissolved and in 1983 she married Joe Reiner, a retired Los Angeles cop with whom she lived in Southern California, where she ran an antiques shop.
Lori Nelson, born August 15 1933, died August 23 2020
