The Glorious Gloria Talbott

Today we pause to acknowledge actress Gloria Talbott (1931-2000).

We’ve had a handful of occasion to mention Talbott here, chiefly in relation to her horror films: she has key roles in The Cyclops (1957), Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), and The Leech Woman (1960). Counterintuitively, she is not related to Lyle Talbot, who also appeared in B movie horror; his name ended in only one T.

That said, she was even more associated with westerns. A native of Glendale (and a descendent of one of the town’s early settlers), she was an expert equestrienne since childhood. Her exotic looks often resulted in her being cast as “Indian maidens”, as she was in Desert Pursuit (1952), The Oregon Trail (1959), Oklahoma Territory (1960), and the Bob Hope comedy Alias Jesse James (1959). She’s also in The Young Guns (1956), The Oklahoman (1957), Cattle Empire (1958), and Arizona Raiders (1965) and appeared in episodes of most of the TV western series of the ’50s and ’60s.

Talbott starred out as a child actress in the Nelson Eddy–Jeanette MacDonald musical Maytime (1937). She also had bit parts Benny Goodman’s Sweet and Lowdown (1944) and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). In 1947 she took the title of “Miss Glendale” in a beauty pageant. Later she was presented on The Bob Hope Chevy Show as “Miss Deb of 1955-56”.

The role that put her on the map for her brief time as a starlet was surely the ensemble comedy We’re No Angels (1955), in which she was billed behind Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, Peter Ustinov, Joan Bennett, Basil Rathbone, and Leo G. Carroll. That is some heady company! She’s also at the center of the comedy The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm (1957) and the sexy melodrama Taming Sutton’s Gal (1957), and she pops her head in Girls Town (1960) with Mamie Van Doren. Her last screen part was in the western An Eye for an Eye (1966) featuring Robert Lansing, Pat Wayne, and Slim Pickens. Gloria Talbott was only 35 at the time of her retirement.