Mara Corday obituary: Hollywood actress and pin-up
'Go ahead, make my day' said Clint Eastwood to an armed robber while rescuing a waitress portrayed by Mara Corday in the 1983 film Sudden Impact. Her character, Loretta, had displayed ingenuity in alerting the crusading cop to the heist by pouring too much sugar into his coffee, but Eastwood's Dirty Harry was undoubtedly the star of the scene.
It hadn't always been the case. Thirty years earlier, Eastwood had an uncredited role with a handful of lines in Tarantula (1955) while Corday was front and centre, screaming for her life as she fled from the 100ft tall 'crawling terror'. The two were part of a set of young actors signed to Universal International Pictures, but Corday was given prominent roles in three sci-fi thrillers about gigantic creatures during this period while Eastwood, she said, was 'completely wasted'.
After Corday's first monster hit came The Giant Claw (1957), featuring a grotesque bird, and The Black Scorpion (1957) in which volcanic activity releases prehistoric arachnids that go on a rampage.In reality, it took much less to scare her. During a lab scene in Tarantula, she was asked to pick up a mouse or a rat. 'I couldn't do it,' she admitted. 'My stand-in did that.'
Apart from this squeamishness, Corday was a willing contract player and became one of Universal's most versatile figures portraying characters from a flirty French cashier in So This Is Paris (1954) to a shepherdess in the western The Man from Bitter Ridge (1955). She did once admit that she would have liked a role with more depth to it. 'Even a murder mystery would have been nice,' she said, but accepted that Universal 'just wasn't doing that kind of thing'.
The one thing she did take umbrage with was the studio's prudishness. At one point Corday was said to be the second most popular pin-up model after Marilyn Monroe among the armed forces, but the studio insisted on modest dress. Her chest was covered with netting in A Day of Fury (1956) and the studio refused her plea to wear a negligee for the ending of Tarantula. 'They always brushed out [of photographs] this mole I have between my cleavage, because it would draw attention,' she complained in an interview with the writer Tom Weaver. 'Ridiculous!'
Marilyn Joan Watts was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1930. Her father, Emerson Watts, worked as a chauffeur and auditor, and her mother, Shirley (née Wood), was a stenographer. She was introduced to showbusiness at the age of 13 when her family moved to Greater Hollywood. She found work as an usherette at the Mayan and Belasco theatres in Los Angeles, where she became so fixated on the world of acting that she travelled by bus across town to collect autographs from some of the greats.
But when it came to her first proper break, she shuffled rather than burst on to the scene. Aged 15, she went with friends to audition for the Shrine Auditorium stage shows. She wasn't a strong dancer, but all the good ones were being used for film musicals so the director acquiesced. 'We can always make you a statue,' he said. True to his word, the director mostly asked her to stand in a corner and sing, but the proximity to guest stars including Frank Sinatra went to the teenager's head. She told her mother: 'I don't have to go to school because I'm gonna be a big star.'
When she was 17, her mother read in the newspaper that Earl Carroll was looking for new faces for his cabaret-restaurant and gave her an ultimatum. 'You go over there and see what you can do. Or you're going back to school to study stenography and learn typing.' The teenager donned a skimpy outfit and was offered a job on the spot, but was too young to take up the role. Unperturbed, her mother forged her birth certificate.
After securing this first proper showbiz job in 1947, she decided to take a more exotic name: Mara — a nickname she was given by a bongo player — and Corday, from the perfume brand. She graduated from the ensemble line to principal showgirl in a year, and was soon performing skits with the comedian Pinky Lee.
After Carroll died in an aircraft crash in 1948 and his theatre was shut, Corday danced in shows and acted in a production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. When she appeared in a small production of The Time of Your Life, she was discovered by the Hollywood talent agent Paul Kohner and quickly signed with him — though for a time she was only cast in a string of small television show roles.
Fortunately, Corday had met lots of photographers who were keen to take her picture during her stint at Carroll's, and she was soon modelling professionally alongside her acting. The influential producer Hal Wallis saw her picture in a magazine and invited her to join his small stable of actors in 1953, and when his company was dissolved six months later she moved on to Universal.
Through the 1950s, Corday was featured in numerous films, including Sea Tiger (1952), Money from Home (1953) with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and So This Is Paris with Tony Curtis, which Universal liked so much that they sent her on a publicity tour. In a prudent move, Corday continued to model for more risqué magazines alongside her acting, and featured as a Playboy playmate of the month in October 1958.
All the attention helped Corday to land her first leading lady role in The Man from Bitter Ridge opposite Lex Barker, with whom she became romantically involved. From there, she was offered a string of roles in other westerns including Raw Edge (1956), A Day of Fury and The Quiet Gun (1957).
Her screen career tailed off after she married the actor Richard Long in 1957, and she mostly stayed at home to look after their three children, though not necessarily out of choice. In an interview for the book Westerns Women, Corday said her husband had turned down roles she'd been offered on her behalf, without telling her — including one opposite Fred MacMurray in The Oregon Trail (1959).
There was also a well-documented incident in 1961 when Long was arrested for beating Corday, but he was released after she refused to sign a complaint against him. In the words of their daughter, the couple were 'divorcing all the time' but nonetheless remained married for 18 years until Long died in 1974. Corday is survived by her daughter, Valerie, and son, Gregory. Her son Carey died in 2008.
After her husband's death, Corday found herself in need of another job for health insurance. Eastwood, 'the most loyal human being in this business', threw her a lifeline with parts in The Gauntlet (1977), Pink Cadillac (1989), The Rookie (1990) and, most famously, Sudden Impact.
Even long after Corday gave up acting, she was a larger-than-life figure. In hospital in her late eighties, the doctor asked: 'What medications are you currently taking?' She replied: 'I'm not on any medication. The only thing I take every night is two martinis.'
Mara Corday, actress, was born on January 3, 1930. She died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease on February 9, 2025, aged 95
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