Debra Paget

The Fourteen-Year Contract

Debra Paget walked into Fox's offices at just fourteen years old. She signed a long-term contract before finishing high school, and her mother oversaw every clause of the document. The studio was looking for an exotic beauty who could fit any imaginary nationality the script called for.

She made her debut in 1948 with Una vida marcada. It was a small role, but it showed executives that the camera loved her in a special way. That shoot in New York taught her how film noir worked before the industry typecast her in Technicolor.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1950 she starred in Broken Arrow alongside James Stewart. She was only sixteen and already playing an Apache woman in a big-budget production that aimed to portray Native Americans with some dignity. The film earned more than four million dollars on its original release and put it on the studio's list of profitable assets.

But the Hollywood machine was not looking for method actresses; it wanted faces that sold tickets. Fox made her follow a strict diet and take intensive dance classes to shape her body to the standards of the day. Paget accepted every order without complaint, understanding that movies were a business built on pure image.

The Snake Dance and the Elvis Phenomenon

1956 arrived and her name appeared on the posters for The Ten Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille chose her to play Lilia because he needed a fragility that would contrast with the hardness of the stones of Egypt. She spent months under artificial sun on the Paramount sets, surrounded by thousands of extras.

Elvis Presley became obsessed with her.

That same year they appeared together in Love Me Tender during the singer's film debut. Elvis proposed to Paget off the set, but she turned him down because her parents did not approve of the relationship. The musician later married a woman who bore an astonishing physical resemblance to the actress.

In the late 1950s she traveled to Germany to work with Fritz Lang. In 1959 she filmed La tumba india and starred in one of the most censored scenes in European film history. That snake dance, in which she wore little more than a few strands of jeweled beads, became an obsession for distributors trying to get around morality codes.

It was her period of greatest international exposure.

Lang took advantage of her athletic ability to create sequences of plastic beauty that Hollywood never dared to replicate. But her return to the United States was bitter, because the major studios were beginning to dismantle their system of contracted stars, and quality roles were scarce.

An early retirement

Her movie career came to an abrupt end in 1963 after she shot El palacio de los espíritus alongside Vincent Price. Paget decided she had had enough of the spotlight and the physical demands of the California film industry. She preferred stability away from the cameras to fading into supporting roles.

She married a Chinese oil magnate in 1962.

She left acting for good in 1964 to devote herself to her family and religious beliefs. She never set foot on a commercial film set again or agreed to nostalgic interviews in the decades that followed. She moved to Texas and almost completely disappeared from public life in Los Angeles.

In 1987 she began a career as a presenter on Christian television networks, where she spoke about faith and traditional values. Her family's net worth after the divorce in 1980 was estimated at ten million dollars at the time.