Diane McBain (1942-2022) - a photo on Flickriver

Diane McBain (1942-2022)

Spanish postcard by Archivo Bermejo, no. C-124, presented by Kores Carboplan. Photo: Warner Bros. Publicity still for the television series Surfside 6 (1960–1962). The Spanish title was Rompeolas 6.

On the morning of 21 December 2022, American actress Diane McBain (1941-2022) passed away. As a bouncy, blonde-coiffed Warner Brothers starlet, she reached a brief peak of popularity during the early 1960s as a "bad girl" and "spoiled rich girl". She was best known for playing an adventurous socialite in the television series Surfside 6 (1960–1962) and as one of Elvis Presley's leading ladies in Spinout (1966).

Diane F. MacBain was born in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio. McBain moved to the Hollywood area at an early age and began her show business career as an adolescent model in print and television advertisements. During her senior year at Glendale High School, while appearing in a Los Angeles play, she was spotted by a Warner Bros talent scout and added to the studio's roster of contract performers. Starting with the premiere of the hour-long, three-shows-in-one Warner Brothers Presents, the studio's TV arm, Warner Brothers Television, provided ABC with nearly 20 shows, including seven Westerns and four detective series. At 17, she was immediately put to work, making her television acting debut in two episodes of Maverick (1959), with Jack Kelly and James Garner, and an episode of Sunset Strip (1960). Having received a positive reaction to McBain's initial performances, the studio realised it had a potential star under contract. She was given a prominent ingenue role in her first feature, the $3.5 million Ice Palace (Vincent Sherman, 1960) alongside Richard Burton and Robert Ryan. The filmed-on-location Technicolor epic was released on in 1960, to mixed reviews, but McBain's notices were generally favourable. McBain had a banner year in 1960. She was assigned two more theatrical features. The first offered her one of three ingenue roles in a major "A" film, Parrish (Delmer Daves, 1961), supporting beefcake star Troy Donahue; the others were Connie Stevens and Sharon Hugueny. The film was a hit and made over $4 million. Warners then gave McBain the star part in her own "B"-film vehicle, Claudelle Inglish (Gordon Douglas, 1961) when she replaced the original choice for the lead, Anne Francis, in the title role. It was based on a novel by Erskine Caldwell. Warner Bros continued to keep McBain busy during 1960 with numerous appearances on its TV shows. She returned to 77 Sunset Strip and had a guest role in The Alaskans, starring Roger Moore. She was also in Bourbon Street Beat, Sugarfoot. and Lawman. Then Warners gave McBain a regular role on Surfside 6 (1960–62), supporting Troy Donahue, Van Williams, and Lee Patterson. Surfside 6 ran for two seasons. Warners gave her another lead role in a feature, Black Gold (Leslie H. Martinson, 1962), but it was not a success. She returned to guest starring on shows like Hawaiian Eye. Producer Hall Bartlett borrowed McBain for a role in The Caretakers (Hall Bartlett, 1963) with Polly Bergen and Joan Crawford. When 77 Sunset Strip kicked off its sixth and final season in 1963 with a special five-part story called 'Five', McBain played opposite Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as "Carla Stevens". She then supported Debbie Reynolds in Mary, Mary (Mervyn LeRoy, 1963). Her last film for Warners was the Western A Distant Trumpet (Raoul Walsh, 1964) with Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette, the final film of director Raoul Walsh. In a 1964 interview, she said she had "mostly been cast as the spoilt rich girl". Warners announced her for Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964) as a secretary. She turned down the role and Warners elected not to renew her contract.

Diane McBain guest starred in Arrest and Trial (1964), The Wild Wild West (1965-1967), The Man from UNCLE (1965-1967), and other series. She was announced for the films Spring Is for Crying and Halcyon Years but neither was made. She made Five from the Hawk in Spain. "I was very stupid about money," McBain said later. "My mother had always made my clothes, and I was embarrassed about it. I became a shopaholic and spent a fortune on store-bought clothes. Tammy Bakker probably copied the way I did my shopping and eyelashes." Work began to dry up. "We were going through a revolution in society with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War," she said. "Now, white Anglo-Saxon, pretty people were low on the totem pole. We were thought to be on the other side, conservatives who were the cause of the war and the civil-rights problem. Dustin Hoffman, yes. Troy Donahue, no. Nobody wanted beautiful people on the screen. They wanted people like them, average. I didn't get much work." In August 1965 McBain's parents reported her as missing. It turned out she had checked herself into a hotel in San Diego under the name "Marilyn Miller" for "a change of faces, scenery and attitudes... I just wanted to be Miss Nobody from Nowhere." She said she had been despondent over a slackening income and not getting the type of roles she wanted. She was Elvis Presley's leading lady in Spinout (Norman Taurog, 1966) alongside Shelley Fabares and Deborah Walley, and later that year she guest-starred on the second season of the ABC series Batman. She played socialite Pinkie Pinkston, a friend of Batman's alias Bruce Wayne. McBain made two films with Fabian Forte at American International Pictures, Thunder Alley (Richard Rush, 1967), and Maryjane (Maury Dexter, 1968). Dexter then put McBain in the lead of AIP's The Mini-Skirt Mob (Maury Dexter, 1968), a hit at the box office. McBain supported Gardner McKay in I Sailed to Tahiti with an All Girl Crew (Richard L. Bare, 1968) and went to Crown International Pictures for Five the Hard Way (Gus Trikonis, 1969). She toured Vietnam in 1968 with Tippi Hedren and Joey Bishop.

During the 1970s, Diane McBain slowed her career somewhat to care for her son Evan, though she continued to make guest appearances in a number of television series. "I never really cared about superstardom, I only cared about the roles that were available to those who were superstars," she later said. "I was motivated to continue on in the face of total failure because I had a child to rear on my own with little help from his father. The acting was the best way for me to make money and the best way for me to be a more present mom in my son's life. Full-time jobs brought in money but kept me away from the day-to-day life of my child." McBain guest starred in Love, American Style (1969), Mannix (1970), To Rome with Love (1970), Land of the Giants (1970), and The Mod Squad (1971). She had roles in the features The Delta Factor (Tay Garnett, 1970) with Yvette Mimieux, The Wild Season (1971), Huyendo del halcón/Flying from the Hawk (Cecil Barker, 1973), Wicked, Wicked (Richard L. Bare, 1973), and The Deathhead Virgin (Norman Foster, 1974), which she later called "the stupidest screenplay I ever had to work with." McBain also guested on the TV series The Wide World of Mystery (1974), Police Story (1974), Barbary Coast (1975), and Marcus Welby, M.D (1976). Towards the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s McBain was in the TV movie Donner Pass: The Road to Survival (James L. Conway, 1978), and such TV series as The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1978), Hawaii Five-O (1980), Charlie's Angels (1979-1981), Days of Our Lives (1982-1984), Dallas (1982), Airwolf (1984) and Knight Rider (1985). She also worked steadily in regional theatre. In 1982, McBain was beaten, robbed, and raped by two men in her garage at West Hollywood at 1:30 am on Christmas Day, after she came home from a party. She began a second career as a rape victim counsellor. They never found the culprits. "The shock of what happened caused loss of memory, inability to concentrate, and I'm still startled out of proportion," she said in 1990. In 1990 she was seeking financing for her screenplay The Spilling Moon about the first woman to trek along the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. McBain appeared in the series Jake and the Fatman (1990), Puppet Master 5 (1994), Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996), Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1998), Invisible Mom II (1999), and The Young and the Restless (1999). In the cinema, she could be seen in the gay comedy The Broken Hearts Club (Greg Berlanti, 2000), starring Timothy Olyphant and Dean Cain, Besotted (Holly Hardman, 2001). Her final screen appearance was in the TV series Strong Medicine (2002). She was also in the TV movie Cab to Canada (1998) which she said: "was enough to make me never want to act again". Diane McBain died from liver cancer in 2022, at the Motion Picture Country Home in Los Angeles, California, where she had lived for a number of years. She was 81.

Source: Wikipedia and IMDb.

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Taken on: December 24, 2022

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