Yvette Mimieux

Biography

Yvette Carmen Mimieux (January 8, 1942 – January 18, 2022) was an American film and television actress who was a major star of the 1960s and 1970s. Her breakout role was in The Time Machine (1960). She was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards and a Photoplay Award during the course of her career.

== Early life == Mimieux was born in Los Angeles on January 8, 1942, to René Mimieux, who was half French and half German, and Maria Montemayor, who was Mexican. Mimieux had two siblings, a sister, Gloria, and a brother, Edouardo. Her career was launched after talent manager Jim Byron happened to meet her and suggested she become an actress. Her first acting appearances were in episodes of the television shows Yancy Derringer and One Step Beyond, both in 1959, at the age of 17.

== Career ==

=== MGM === Mimieux appeared in George Pal's film version of H. G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine (1960) starring Rod Taylor, in which she played the character Weena. It was made for MGM, which put her under long-term contract. Her first film was Platinum High School (1960), a low-budget teen crime drama produced by Albert Zugsmith for MGM starring Mickey Rooney and released two months before The Time Machine. Her performance in Platinum High School earned her a 1960 Golden Globe Awards nomination for "New Star Of The Year - Actress". Mimieux guest-starred in an episode of Mr Lucky, then was one of several leads in the highly popular teen comedy-drama Where the Boys Are (1960), along with Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss, and Connie Francis. MGM put Mimieux in the ingénue role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1961), an expensive flop. Arthur Freed wanted to team her and George Hamilton in a remake of The Clock, but it was not made. Mimieux had a central role in the romantic drama Light in the Piazza (1962), playing a mentally disabled girl. The film paired her romantically with Hamilton. The film lost money, but was well regarded critically. She later said: "I suppose I have a soulful quality. I was often cast as a wounded person, the 'sensitive' role." In 1962, Mimieux was slated for a role in A Summer Affair at MGM, but it was not made. Mimieux had a small part in Pal's The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), another commercial disappointment. Later that year, she appeared in Diamond Head (1963) with Charlton Heston. Mimieux went to United Artists for Toys in the Attic, based on the play by Lillian Hellman and co-starring Geraldine Page and Dean Martin. At MGM, Mimieux guest-starred on two episodes of Dr. Kildare alongside Richard Chamberlain in 1964. She played a surfer suffering from epilepsy, a performance that was much acclaimed and led to a 1965 Golden Globe nomination for "Best Actress In A Television Series". Mimieux made a cameo as herself in Looking for Love (1964) starring Connie Francis, her costar from Where the Boys Are. She also played Richard Chamberlain's wife in Joy in the Morning (1965), a romantic melodrama.

=== Post-MGM === Mimieux was in a Western with Max von Sydow for 20th Century Fox, The Reward (1965); the Disney comedy Monkeys, Go Home! (1967); and the heist film The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967). Mimieux did The Desperate Hours (1967) for TV and was reunited with Rod Taylor in the MGM war movie Dark of the Sun (1968). In 1968, she narrated a classical music concert at the Hollywood Bowl. In 1968, Mimieux was top-billed in the sex comedy Three in the Attic, a hit for AIP starring Christopher Jones, and then appeared in the critically acclaimed 1969 movie The Picasso Summer alongside Albert Finney. In 1970, she was the female lead in The Delta Factor, an action film co-starring Christopher George.

=== Television ===

Mimieux had one of the leads in The Most Deadly Game (1970–1971), a short-lived television series from Aaron Spelling. She replaced Inger Stevens, who had been slated to star,— but died one month before production began. For this role, Mimieux was nominated for the 1971 Golden Globe Award for Best Television Actress — Drama Series. Around 1971, Mimieux had a business selling Haitian products and studied archaeology; she traveled several months of each year. After making the television movies Death Takes a Holiday (1971) and Black Noon (1971), she sued her agent for not providing her with movie work despite having taken her money. Mimieux played the head stewardess in MGM's hostage thriller Skyjacked (1972), starring Charlton Heston and James Brolin and was in the Fox science-fiction film The Neptune Factor (1973).

By the early 1970s, Mimieux was unhappy with the roles offered to actresses:The women they [male screenwriters] write are all one-dimensional. They have no complexity in their lives. It's all surface. There's nothing to play. They're either sex objects or vanilla pudding. Mimieux had been writing for several years before this film, mostly journalism and short stories. She had the idea for a story about a Pirandello-like theme:the study of a woman, the difference between what she appears to be and what she is: appearance vs reality...[the more I thought about the character] the more I wanted to play her. Here was the kind of nifty, multifaceted part I'd been looking for. So instead of a short story, I wrote it as a film. Mimieux wrote a thriller, which she took to producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, who then produced it for ABC as a television film. It aired as Hit Lady (1974), in which Mimieux played the title character.