Elizabeth : Hazel Court

No sooner had I posted a birthday celebration for Valerie Hobson that news came of another screen Elizabeth. Hazel Court, the ingenuous fiancée to Peter Cushing’s cruel Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein of 1957, passed away on April 15. An autobiography, Horror Queen, is due for publication on the 23rd.

I am surprised how sad the news made me. I can’t believe how deep my heart sank. I realize now how important Hazel Court was to me. I remember how I sought out her pictures and how her presence elevated so many films that I loved. Her list of horror films is long and storied, with significant contributions made at Hammer Films of England and American International of Hollywood.

In the winter of 1956, Court joined Cushing, Christopher Lee, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and director Terence Fisher at Hammer’s Bray Studios to make cinematic history, in the form of The Curse of Frankenstein. Court’s four-year old daughter, Sally Walsh, appeared briefly as a young Elizabeth. When the film went out around the world in the summer of ’57, despite being shredded as sadistic and repulsive by British critics, it was box-office gold, and the Hammer era of Gothic Horrors was launched.

Hazel Court was ravishing, “a beauty among the beasts” as one reviewer put it. You couldn’t possibly miss her, of course. Imagine: A redhead with green eyes, and generous cleavage bound in Victorian corsets. She was tagged as a “Scream Queen”, and she did have to shriek off the threats of monsters and villains, but she was also one hell of an actress. When given a proper role, she could make it swing. Look at her beguiling turn in Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963) — see a YouTube clip here — and see how she holds her own in a scene with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and a desperately young Jack Nicholson.

By the late sixties, Hazel Court was mostly working in American television, and then she walked away and went on to other things. Encouraged by her friend, art expert Vincent Price, she became an artist, another thing that made me connect with her. She was a painter first, then a sculptor of Italian marble. Admirably, Hazel Court was proud of her horror films, always willing to share her memories, and generous in her recollections of fellow actors and co-stars.

Thinking back, there are three brief scenes that instantly come to mind when I think of Hazel Court. She always seemed to be wearing one of those spectacular opera dresses. In The Raven, she exchanges lines with the venerable Boris Karloff, her back turned to him as he fixes her dress. In The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), she backs up the stairs, keeping a horrified distance from a clawing Anton Diffring, disintegrating before our eyes as his rejuvenation experiment fails. And the most memorable scene, an instant, indelible recall for me, comes in The Curse of Frankenstein, as she prowls the abandoned laboratory and steps out on the balcony…

That’s how I remember the unforgettable Hazel Court, in her bustled, off-the-shoulder dress, holding a gasoline lamp, unaware of The Monster lurking close behind.

Hazel Court's autobiography, from Tomahawk Press.

An obituary in The International Herald Tribune.

Wonderful, touching posts about Hazel Court by Arbogast and Tim Lucas.

A fan page.

The trailer for The Curse of Frankenstein.

Updates:

A recent interview with Hazel Court in a Lake Tahoe paper.

An obituary at Cinefantastique Online.

A rememberance by Tom Weaver on Fangoria.com.

Elizabeth : Valerie Hobson

Valerie Hobson was born on this day, April 14, in 1917. In 1935, she played Elizabeth, the “true” Bride of Frankenstein in the classic film of that name.

The stunning, Irish born actress was praised for parts played in The Drum (1938), Great Expectations (1946) and the wonderful black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Horror film fans remember Hobson for her turns in four Universal films, all made in 1935. She appeared in the curious, Frankensteinian Life Returns, which featured newsreel footage of a re-animated dog, she played opposite Claude Rains in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, she was the Bride of the Werewolf, Henry Hull, in Werewolf of London and, of course, she played Elizabeth to Colin Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein in Bride of Frankenstein, replacing Mae Clarke who had originated the part in the 1931 film.

Hobson, unfortunately, doesn’t have much to do in the film besides fretting for her frail husband in the opening scenes, and later on struggling a little against the loose ropes that bind her as she is kidnapped and held to blackmail Frankenstein into creating the Monster’s Bride.

Worth noting: The original trailer for the film — here on YouTube — includes an outtake, not seen in the finished film, of Karloff’s Monster grabbing and carrying Elizabeth away.

Hobson abandoned her film career in the early fifties, shortly after her wedding to British politician John Profumo, whose name would become synonymous with a notorious sex and spy scandal in 1963. Hobson stood by her disgraced husband and the couple devoted the rest of their lives to very significant charity work, eventually earning redemption for Profumo and a prestigious award for contributions “countering social deprivation and exclusion”. A son, David, wrote a memoir about his parents and the impact of the scandal on their lives in which he paints a picture of his mother as a remarkably strong and dignified woman.

Valerie Hobson passed away in London, in 1998.

Valerie Hobson on the Internet Movie Database, the British Film Institute’s Screen Online, and New York Times obituary.

A review of David Profumo’s book, Bringing The House Down (2006).