Hazel Court (1926 to 2008) was the English actress who played Elizabeth in The Curse of Frankenstein and starred in three Corman Poe films.
Quick Specs
| Born | February 10, 1926, Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, England |
| Died | April 15, 2008, at home near Lake Tahoe, California, aged 82, of a heart attack |
| Hammer | Elizabeth in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957); Janine Dubois in The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) |
| Corman Poe films | Emily Gault in The Premature Burial (1962); Lenore Craven in The Raven (1963); Juliana in The Masque of the Red Death (1964) |
| Other genre | Ghost Ship (1952); Lois in Devil Girl from Mars (1954); Dr. Blood’s Coffin (1961); The Twilight Zone, “The Fear” (1964) |
| Final screen appearance | uncredited cameo in Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981) |
| Marriages | Dermot Walsh (1949 to 1963); Don Taylor (1964 until his death in 1998) |
| Also | painter and sculptor, trained in Italy; autobiography Hazel Court: Horror Queen (2008) |
Who She Is
Hazel Court was born on February 10, 1926, in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, the daughter of a professional cricketer, G. W. Court, who played for Durham. She studied drama in Birmingham and was appearing on stage as a teenager when the J. Arthur Rank Organisation spotted and signed her. By 18 she had her first film bit part, and through the 1940s she was one of Britain’s popular pin-ups.
In 1949 she married the Irish actor Dermot Walsh, her co-star in several films. Their daughter, Sally, would make a screen appearance of her own in her mother’s most famous film. The marriage ended in 1963, and in 1964 she married the American actor and director Don Taylor, whom she knew through Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a series he directed episodes of and she appeared in. She settled permanently in California, had a son, Jonathan, and a daughter, Courtney, with Taylor, and became stepmother to his daughters Anne and Avery. They were married until his death in 1998.
The Work, and What She Did in It
She was on screen from 1944, still in her teens, and her Rank years included Carnival (1946), in which she played a crippled girl, Holiday Camp (1947), the hit that introduced the Huggett family, and Bond Street (1948). Horror was not her plan; she wanted comedy. But the genre found her early. In Ghost Ship (1952) she and Dermot Walsh play a young couple who buy a haunted yacht. In the Danziger brothers’ cult science fiction picture Devil Girl from Mars (1954) she is Lois, a fashion model stranded at a remote Scottish inn when the Martian Nyah (Patricia Laffan, the actual Devil Girl) lands outside. Second-feature crime dramas such as The Scarlet Web (1954) and The Narrowing Circle (1956) filled the mid-1950s.
Then came The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), directed by Terence Fisher from Jimmy Sangster’s script, the film that launched Hammer horror and the Gothic revival. Court plays Elizabeth, Victor Frankenstein’s cousin and fiancée, opposite Peter Cushing’s Baron and Christopher Lee’s Creature, with Robert Urquhart as Victor’s tutor and colleague Paul Krempe. It was Hammer’s first Gothic horror in colour and the first Frankenstein film in colour, and Court was its female lead; audiences were seeing her red hair and green eyes in colour for the first time. Elizabeth is the fiancée kept in ignorance of the laboratory, and the marriage the two make during the story is the domestic surface Cushing’s obsession plays against. In the childhood flashback, the young Elizabeth is played by Court’s own daughter, Sally Walsh, then about four. Court was 31 when the film opened.
She was making comedy at the same time. In the CBS sitcom Dick and the Duchess (1957 to 1958), filmed in Britain, she played Jane Starrett, a patrician Englishwoman married to Patrick O’Neal’s American insurance investigator. Hammer brought her back for The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), Fisher again directing. Anton Diffring is Dr. Georges Bonnet, a sculptor who has kept himself young for a century, and Court is Janine Dubois, his former model and lover, with Christopher Lee as Dr. Pierre Gerard. Between studios she also made Dr. Blood’s Coffin (1961), as Nurse Linda Parker opposite Kieron Moore.
From the late 1950s she was a regular guest on American television: several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents between 1958 and 1961, Thriller, Bonanza, Danger Man, Dr. Kildare and The Twilight Zone, in “The Fear” (1964), the original series’ penultimate episode.
The second movement of her horror career belonged to Roger Corman and American International Pictures. In The Premature Burial (1962), Ray Milland is Guy Carrell, a man obsessed with being buried alive, and Court is his wife, Emily Gault. She is no screaming bystander. Emily is at the centre of the conspiracy against Guy’s sanity and fortune, and the film’s cold turn depends on her. It is Guy, not Emily, who ends up in the tomb he built to escape that fate.
The Raven (1963), Corman’s comic Poe film written by Richard Matheson, put her among horror royalty: Vincent Price as the sorcerer Dr. Erasmus Craven, Peter Lorre as Dr. Bedlo, Boris Karloff as Dr. Scarabus, and a young Jack Nicholson as Bedlo’s son. Court is Lenore Craven, Erasmus’s supposedly dead wife, who turns out to be very much alive and in league with Scarabus. She is the pivot of the film’s magical duel and holds her own against all of them.
The Masque of the Red Death (1964), shot in England and photographed by Nicolas Roeg, cast Price as Prince Prospero, Jane Asher as the innocent Francesca, and Court as Juliana, Prospero’s mistress. Juliana willingly undergoes a Satanic initiation to secure her place at his side, the film’s most voluntary damnation and the adult counterweight to Asher’s innocence, and she is killed by Prospero’s falcon. She was 38 when it was released, and it was her last lead in a feature film.
Those three Corman films ended her run of film leads, but not her career. Television kept her busy into the early 1970s, with The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, Mannix and McMillan & Wife (1972), and she made one last, uncredited appearance as a party guest in Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981).
Cool Verified Facts
- Her daughter was in The Curse of Frankenstein with her, as the child Elizabeth.
- Across the verified record she worked with Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Ray Milland, under Terence Fisher and Roger Corman: both halves of the Gothic revival, Hammer and AIP, in one filmography.
- Corman directed her in exactly three films. A widely syndicated obituary claimed five; the credit record says three.
- She studied sculpture in Italy, and after her film leads ended she gave much of her time to painting and sculpture alongside raising her family.
- She finished her autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen, but did not live to see it. Tomahawk Press published it in Britain in April 2008, about a week after her death, with a US edition following.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
She treated the scream as a technique. Looking back in 2000, she said: “One can’t just scream. To give a good scream one has to take an enormous breath, and suck one’s stomach in, and fill one’s lungs and let go.”
She remembered the studio fondly, telling the same paper: “Hammer studios were like a big, loving family. Peter Cushing was the star attraction and a delight to work with.”
The trade press of her day was blunter about what the “scream queen” label rested on. Variety, quoted in her obituaries, wrote that actresses of her era “often relied on her cleavage and her ability to shriek in fear and die horrible deaths.” Her own filmography argues back: in The Premature Burial and The Raven she is the plot’s agent, not its victim.
She kept faith with the fans. Her daughter Sally Walsh said that even in later years Court received “over 100 pieces of fan mail a month” and answered every one. After Don Taylor’s death she became a fixture of the horror convention circuit, a fan favourite into her eighties.
She died of a heart attack at her home near Lake Tahoe on April 15, 2008, aged 82.
Why She Matters
Hazel Court is the female face of the Hammer breakthrough. The Curse of Frankenstein restarted Gothic horror in colour and made stars of Cushing and Lee, and her Elizabeth is the third point of that founding triangle. When the genre’s centre of gravity shifted to Corman’s Poe cycle, she moved with it: three Poe films in three years, opposite Price, Karloff, Lorre and Milland. That bridge between Hammer and AIP is her place in horror history, and it needs no superlative.
She also had more range inside the type than the label allows: fiancée kept in the dark, conspiring wife, treacherous wife back from the dead, willing Satanist. And she had a second life, from Rank pin-up to horror lead to working American television actress to a sculptor trained in Italy, whose memoir arrived a week after she died. The art was a career, not a footnote.