Italian postcard by Rotalfoto, Milano, no. N 159. Carol Lynley.
Blond, blue-eyed American actress Carol Lynley who starred in the The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and numerous other films, has died. She was 77. The actress, who had an attractively feline appeal, earned a Golden Globe nomination as a newcomer for Blue Denim (1959) about a naive teenager seeking an illegal abortion. It was a role she originated on Broadway. Last Friday, Lynley died in her sleep Tuesday in Los Angeles.
Carol Lynley was born Carol Ann Jones in New York. Her parents were Cyril Jones, and Frances Peltch. She began her professional career as 'Carolyn Lee', a successful child model for the Sears & Roebuck department store in New York. Trying to branch out into acting early on, she discovered that another individual by that name (born seven years earlier) was already on the books of Actors' Equity, thus Carolyn changed her moniker by fusing the 'lyn' and the 'lee' to create 'Lynley'. In April 1957, she was profiled by Life magazine and appeared on its cover. She was 15 years old and starring in the Broadway production 'The Potting Shed'. Her first important film role came in The Light in the Forest (Herschel Daugherty, 1958) for Walt Disney Productions. It was a promising start and a New York Times reviewer praised her performance. After her role in Blue Denim (Philip Dunne, 1959) opposite Brandon De Wilde, she went on to play other ingénue roles and troubled teens before gradually shedding her wholesome image by the early 60s. She then starred in Return to Peyton Place (José Ferrer, 1961), playing an author whose book revealing her New Hampshire hometown’s darkest secrets and scandals causes her and her family trouble. This was followed by the bawdy sex farce Under the Yum Yum Tree (David Swift, 1963), with Lynley as a virginal college student in a New York apartment block pursued by a lecherous landlord/playboy (Jack Lemmon). Luckily, better opportunities to prove her acting mettle turned up with a double role in The Cardinal (Otto Preminger, 1963) opposite Tom Tryon, and as the tormented mother of a kidnapped child in the excellent psychological thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965) co-starring Laurence Olivier.
In March 1965, Carol Lynley posed nude for an issue of Playboy magazine. That same year, she played the title role in a turgid biopic of 1930s Hollywood sex symbol Jean Harlow. While the quality of her films tended to decline after the mid-1960s, there were still entertaining moments in B-pictures like The Shuttered Room (David Greene, 1967) and the lurid thriller Once You Kiss a Stranger... (Robert Sparr, 1969) as a psychotic murderess. In Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure (Ronald Neame, 1972), she was one of the ill-fated passengers, pop singer Nonnie Parry. Her character performs the song 'The Morning After', although the vocals were dubbed. The song went on to win an Academy Award. After 1967, television provided most of her work, including guest spots in seminal shows like Mannix (1967), The Invaders (1967), Hawaii Five-O (1968) and as co-star of the TV pilot for The Night Stalker (John Llewellyn Moxey, 1972) with Darren McGavin. In her penultimate role, Lynley played a grandmother in a film with a very similar title to the one which had launched her career: A Light in the Forest (John Carl Buechler, 2003). Carol Lynley retired from screen acting in 2006 and passed away on 3 September 2019 from a heart attack at the age of 77. She had been married to actor-producer Michael Selsman from 1960-1964, and they had one daughter, Jill Selsman (1962). She had an affair, off and on for 18 years, with David Frost. Carol Lynley appeared in more than 100 films and television series.
Sources: I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Time, Wikipedia and IMDb.