Disastrous Demise: Carol Lynley 1942-2019

It's tough when one of your favorite movies is now forty-seven years old and you must watch the stars of it pass away, one-by-one. Even so, with many celebrated cast members of The Poseidon Adventure (1972) having already met their fate, this one came sooner than expected. After all, Carol Lynley was seventy-seven years of age and that's no longer ancient by today's standards. We celebrate her career with this photo tribute "the morning after" her passing from a heart attack.

Born February 13th, 1942 in Manhattan, New York, Carol Ann Jones was soon making rounds as a child model. She used the name Carolyn Lee for this task and she became quite successful, appearing in countless ads and teen-oriented magazine covers.

All that work led to her appearance on a precipitous cover of Life magazine. When acting offers came her way following this, she went to Actor's Equity to register her name, Carolyn Lee only to be told that it was already in use. So she merely changed the emphasis and spelling and thereafter was known as Carol Lynley!

After a few television appearances, the pretty, yet unseasoned, young actress was picked by the Walt Disney Studios to costar with young James MacArthur in The Light in the Forest (1958.) The colorful, location-shot story is about a kidnapped white boy raised by a Delaware tribe who has to rockily re-assimilate back into civilization in the wake of a peace treaty. Lynley was among six young ladies nominated as Most Promising Female Newcomer at the next Golden Globe Awards, but the title went instead to Tina Louise, Linda Cristal and Susan Kohner.

Swiftly, she found herself under contract to 20th Century Fox and placed opposite Clifton Webb and Jane Wyman in the family comedy Holiday for Lovers (1958), based on a Broadway play. Jill St. John portrayed her older sister (a role that had been intended for Diane Varsi before she fled Hollywood and her Fox contract.) The mother role had been cast with Gene Tierney until illness led her to drop out at the eleventh hour.

Lynley had also worked on Broadway, first in The Potting Shed, followed by Blue Denim, a controversial production thanks to the subject matter of teen sex and abortion. The 1959 film adaptation was cleaned up a bit, yet still caused a stir. Brandon De Wilde played her boyfriend. Lynley was again (!) nominated for a Golden Globe as Most Promising Female Newcomer in a crowded field of eight, but this time lost to Angie Dickinson, Janet Munro, Tuesday Weld and one Stella Stevens. Lynley did the Fabian film Hound-Dog Man (1959), then married publicist Michael Selsman in 1960.

Diane Varsi's departure left the door open for Lynley to inherit the role of Allison MacKenzie in 1961's Return to Peyton Place, in which the still-young character heads to New York City to work on her novel and falls for the married editor who's helping her with it.

Now a married woman (with a baby daughter arriving in 1962), Lynley was still playing ingenue roles, such as in The Last Sunset (1961), where she was the daughter of Kirk Douglas and Dorothy Malone. She's at her bustiest ever in this publicity photo for the film!

After having her first and only child and doing some TV guest roles, Lynley costarred in Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), a comedy which had her as a young lady pursued by a manically lascivious landlord played by Jack Lemmon.

A change of pace came with The Cardinal (1963) in which she went brunette and played the sister of Tom Tryon's title character. She portrayed her own daughter in the lengthy Otto Preminger epic and was noted for one particularly wince-inducing scene involving the perilous birth of a child.

By 1964, she was still looking great, playing a mental patient in the thriller Shock Treatment, opposite Stuart Whitman and a duplicitous Lauren Bacall.

That same year she joined Ann-Margret and Pamela Tiffin in The Pleasure Seekers, a semi-musical update of Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) following the love lives of three American girls living in Madrid, Spain. In the film, she shares a scene with Gene Tierney who had been slated to play her mother in Holiday for Lovers. Here, Tierney slaps her face and calls her a tramp! Lynley's sole marriage ended this year as well.

With Carroll Baker's color version of Harlow (1965) on the horizon, Lynley was rushed into a cheaper black and white version (shot in eight days!) also called Harlow, with the intention of getting into theaters first, which it did. Ginger Rogers was cast as her mother.

While Lynley looked "good" in her costumes, I never though she (or Carroll Baker for that matter!) looked very much like Jean Harlow. It takes more than a beauty mark and a white wig...

Nope. Still don't see it...

In 1965, Lynley worked for Otto Preminger again in Bunny Lake Is Missing, a murky thriller in which her young daughter goes missing, but then it seems as if perhaps the child never even existed to begin with!

Also in 1965, Lynley posed semi-nude for Playboy magazine, divorced and with an eye towards adding new dimension to her career.

While she was still winning the occasional leading role in movies, the Playboy spread didn't seem to ignite any particular interest in her or lead to a major part. She was cast in The Shuttered Room (1967), a chiller that found her married to Gig Young and menaced by a young Oliver Reed.

Danger Route (1967) offered an intriguing role as the girlfriend of secret agent Richard Johnson, but the movie sank in the mire of countless James Bond imitators coming out at that time.

1969 brought the minor comedy The Maltese Bippy, opposite then-hot Laugh-In's Dick Martin and Dan Rowan. Rare is the airing of this parody of The Maltese Falcon (1941) nowadays.

In Once You Kiss a Stranger (1969), she took on the old Robert Walker part from Strangers on a Train (1951) as a murderous loon who arranges to kill someone for Paul Burke if he'll do the same for her. Any homoerotic tension in the original was dissipated by her casting this time out. And, as often seemed to happen to her, she was saddled with a less-than-stellar leading man.

Still, she was looking great (still only twenty-seven!) in a bikini in the cheesy, half-baked film.

She next played an unwed pregnant girl in Norwood (1970), all about Vietnam veteran Glen Campbell's attempt to cross the country and appear on radio's Louisiana Hayride.

After several TV-movie appearances and guest roles, she'd been reduced by 1972 to having to appear in drek as bad as Beware! The Blob, a belated sequel to the 1958 camp classic, directed by Larry Hagman and starring Robert Walker Jr., son of the man whose role she had inherited in Stranger. Things were about to look up, however, even if briefly...

She was selected by producer Irwin Allen to appear in his ambitious new disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, which few people besides Allen were convinced was going to float at the box office. However, it was a smash success, coming in at number two for the year behind The Godfather.

Most of her scenes in the film were alongside comic actor (and Oscar-winner) Red Buttons, though their off-screen relationship was sometimes contentious. She infamously informed columnist Earl Wilson that Buttons was a "cunt!" Stories vary, however, on who was to blame for their issues (and they, like everyone else in the movie, worked well together in order to stay on time and under budget.)

As band vocalist Nonnie Parry, who struggles to survive an obstacle-laden overturned luxury liner, Lynley won over hordes of devoted fans and was shown to great advantage in a massive hit. Strangely enough, she was not able to capitalize on it when it came to future cinematic efforts.

Apart from the little-seen 1973 movie Cotter, Lynley only worked on television (including Irwin Allen's Flood!, 1976) and again on Broadway in Absurd Person Singular until 1977 when she costarred in such minor fare as Bad Georgia Road, a drive-in style flick inspired by things such as Macon County Line (1974.) Even so, she still looked good and sported a string bikini in one scene.

She did get to canoodle in bed with Tom Selleck in the drearily dull The Washington Affair (1977), a VHS of which seemed to be sitting on a shelf in every video rental store of the 1980s.

In 1978, she starred in an update of The Cat and the Canary, as a will beneficiary forced to stay the night in a house full of angry, deranged relatives.

Lynley made no further films of note, but did work fairly steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s. She especially enjoyed working on Aaron Spelling shows like The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels, Hart to Hart, Fantasy Island and Hotel, which had her portraying a friend of Barbara Parkins who confesses that she's in love with her!

As her acting career wound down, she could still be spotted at various industry events and premieres.

She had long since settled her hash with Poseidon costar Red Buttons and the two enjoyed meeting up from time to time, reveling in the diehard cult glory that their long ago disaster movie had engendered.

Never nominated for an Academy Award, she did make two appearances on the telecast. One, in 1963, came when she accepted an Oscar for the absent cinematographer of Lawrence of Arabia. Her hair uncharacteristically piled up and wearing demure jewelry, she looked radiant.

In 1979, she and Robby Benson paired up to present the Oscars for Short Film.

We will miss the beguiling face of Carol Lynley, who played a role not only in one of our most beloved movies, but also in other fun flicks like Return to Peyton Place and The Shuttered Room.

BONUS PIC

Found this one late in the game, but just had to share it as it was so good and ticked a lot of my 1960s glamor boxes!