Gloria Talbott

Screams, Monsters and Tight Budgets

Gloria Talbott was born in Glendale in 1931 and was already in front of a camera before turning six. Her first role was a brief appearance in Maytime during 1937. But big-studio films would not become her lasting home or the place where she would go down in video store history.

In 1957, she starred in The Cyclops under the direction of Bert I. Gordon. It was a low-budget production with visual effects that look comical today. But she took the job seriously and made viewers forget the cardboard sets.

That same year she shot The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll.

The industry quickly typecast her in genre films. Movie posters played up her wide-eyed look of panic and her sharp features to sell tickets. In 1958 came I Married a Monster from Outer Space, a film that critics rediscovered decades later for its subtext about marital paranoia in postwar America.

And audiences recognized her at every premiere.

She worked at a frantic pace because B-movie contracts left no room for long breaks. In 1957 she released four different feature films. She wasn't chasing awards but paying the bills in a system that chewed through young actresses at an astonishing rate.

The Spurs Hideout

Westerns were her other major professional home. In 1955, she appeared in The Tall Men alongside Clark Gable. She wasn't the star of the show, but she held her own confidently in front of the giants of the era. That experience taught her that television would be her natural next destination.

She spent much of the 1960s bouncing from set to set. She appeared in single episodes of Gunsmoke, Bonanza and Perry Mason. Television shoots were fast and demanding. She always kept to production schedules and rarely had to redo a take because of forgotten lines.

But exhaustion began to take its toll.

She married four times and decided that Hollywood was no longer her priority by the late 1960s. Her last credited appearance was in an episode of The Wild Wild West in 1966. That retirement was not a dramatic impulse but a deliberate decision to raise her son away from the spotlight.

She was looking for a quiet life.

Gloria Talbott died on September 19, 2000 at a hospital in Glendale from kidney failure. She was 69 years old at the time of her death.