Alzheimer's disease struck the "The Nutty Professor" actress some years ago.
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| Stella Stevens |
Stella Stevens, an actress best known for her work in "The Nutty Professor" and "The Poseidon Adventures," passed away on Friday at the age of 84.
Her son, actor and producer Andrew Stevens, acknowledged that his mother had long been suffering Alzheimer's. The finest comedies of the 1960s and 1970s have Stevens in leading parts.
Estelle Caro Eggleston, who was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1938, married young, at the age of 16, and gave birth to her lone child in 1955, when she was 17 years old. Two years later, though, her love had dissolved, and she had filed for divorce.
When a student at Memphis State University, he began acting and modeling, and in 1959, he made his motion picture debut in a supporting part in the Bing Crosby musical "Say One for Me."
She described her early years to FilmTalk in 2017 as "essentially being transformed into a global sex symbol" by Paramount's head of press. He required me to participate in several picture shoots with photographers, both inside and outside, in various locations. During those years, I had the opportunity to meet outstanding actors and directors and was seen everywhere. He said, "That was a really exciting period.
She received her first Paramount Pictures deal soon after winning the Golden Globe for Best New Star and being crowned Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month. She appeared in many movies there, including "Girls! Girls! Girls!" with Elvis Presley, though she only agreed to be in it because she had been offered a role in a Montgomery Clift movie.
He said that the director Norman Taurog's attitude caused the six terrible days of filming, however he added that Presley was kind. But since that film didn't do well either, all of his aspirations for Clift were destroyed.
After this, Stevens worked on the movie "The Nutty Professor," in which he portrayed Lewis's pupil Stella Purdy, with whom he is obsessed. Jerry Lewis had reportedly told the Paramount executives that he wanted to cast the most attractive actress in the company, or something along those lines, and they had given him the part, he recalled.
“We all tried to make the characters that he created in the script special, wonderful, unique, and if you ask me, I think that's why the movie is still relevant after so many years,” he said.
Some of his works, including "The secret of my success," "The silencers," and "When angels go, danger follows," in which he co-starred as a nun with Rosalind Russell, were produced by Columbia Pictures. She was notable for playing Linda Rogo, the character's wife, in the films "The Poseidon Adventure," "The Ballad of Cable Hogue," and "Slaughter," which she starred in opposite Jim Brown.
Stevens once astonished many with a comment in which he said that Vincente Minnelli, with whom he had co-directed "The wooing of Eddie's father" in 1963, was his favorite filmmaker despite having collaborated with a large list of them during his career.
The actress expressed her unhappiness at not being able to achieve the finest performance from her directors in a 1994 interview, and even mentioned that her goals had changed.
"I want to be like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, two of my favorite actors and actresses. I wanted to be like a blast of youth and then get off the screen when I started to develop a few crow's feet or aging," she remarked. "But I also had to work on my project as a director... At the age of 83, I witnessed (Bob Hope) cracking jokes and enjoying himself. I then declared that I would never want to leave him. I aspire to be this man. Continuity is what I seek. He once said, "I want to die on a movie set.