by Stephen Vagg
Yvette Mimieux got typecast early in her career as an ethereal, hippy-ish, space-y dream girl, and never managed to escape that image, despite many valiant attempts. Still, she had an amazing life and career, appearing in countless classic film and television projects that are enjoyed time and time again.
Mimieux was born in Los Angeles in 1942. Dad was French-German while mum was Mexican, and their daughter grew up to be the epitome of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, porcelain-skinned Californian.
Mimieux’s beauty was noticed while she was out horse riding by talent manager Jim Byron, who had parked his helicopter in the area (as you do), was struck by her appearance and persuaded her that she should be in pictures. Or so the publicity went, anyway – another possibly more likely version of the story, is that he spotted her in beauty contests; regardless, Mimieux was signed and began appearing in television.
Stardom came very quickly, her first film role in fact: she was screen tested by Vincent Minnelli for a part in Home from the Hill (1959); George Pal looked at the test to examine possible male leads for his upcoming MGM science fiction tale, The Time Machine (1960) and ended up casting Mimieux. The role was Weena, a beautiful, dim, loin-cloth-wearing creature of the future – a barely legal dream girl with a stoner energy and little agency, but hugely effective on screen. Pal called Mimieux, “A cross between a fairy princess and Brigitte Bardot.” The eventual male star, Australia’s own Rod Taylor, later declared ungallantly, “I knew when I did her screen test that Yvette couldn’t act at all. But she had a sulky quality which George believed was right. The innocence she projected as part of her character was actually innate in her own personality. I often wondered if she was even listening to me when we shot our scenes.” Thanks, Rod!
Still, Pal was entirely correct – Mimieux’s performance was a great contributor to The Time Machine’s success.
A delighted MGM signed Mimieux to a long-term deal and promptly had her run around in a bikini and be assaulted in an Albert Zugsmith potboiler, Platinum High School (1960). This actually came out before The Time Machine due to the latter’s longer post production process.
The studio put her alongside a bunch of other young contract players, including George Hamilton, Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss and Connie Francis in Where the Boys Are (1960). Mimieux played a girl who gets sexually assaulted – a powerful subplot that contributed immeasurably to the film’s success as it grounded the adventures in a realistic framework; none of the subsequent rip-offs of Where the Boys Are seemed to realise this (Come Fly With Me, Follow the Boys, Palm Springs Weekend) and (coincidentally?) none did as well.
MGM announced Rod Taylor and Mimieux would be in Return of the Time Machine, but the project unfortunately never happened, due to Taylor’s reluctance – he was more amenable in the late 1970s when another attempt was made at a sequel but it didn’t happen.
Mimieux was used by Minnelli in MGM’s expensive big budget remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1961) with Glenn Ford hideously miscast and the whole story reduced to a tale of Nazis and anti-Nazis; she played Ford’s Nazi-fighting sister. Podcaster Karina Longworth has argued that this film be re-appraised, so it has its fans, but it’s fairly hard going and the public stayed away in droves.
Typecast in ethereal roles, Mimieux played a mentally delayed girl who finds love with Italian George Hamilton in Light in the Piazza (1962): a very sweet performance, and an interesting film – it lost money but has never stopped playing and was turned into a stage musical. She was reunited with George Pal in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963), a perfect dancing princess – the film needed more of her and Russ Tamblyn, less of Laurence Harvey and Karl Boehm.
Columbia borrowed her for Diamond Head (1963), a melodrama where she was loved by George Chakiris and James Darren and (incestuously?) controlled by brother Charlton Heston, in a role meant for Clark Gable; she’s actually excellent in the film (by now, she had developed a neat line in nervous breakdowns), which was a hit.
Mimieux played Dean Martin’s naive bride in an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1963); the film is remembered today for being a rare appearance by Martin in a straight drama. Far more acclaimed was Mimieux’s hugely popular guest star stint on the Dr Kildare TV series with Richard Chamberlain – this was so well received that MGM combined them in Joy in the Morning (1965), a movie about a law student who gets married (and that’s pretty much it); no one liked it.
While Mimieux mostly played naïve fools on screen, she was far from being one in real life. She accurately observed, “I came into films at the end of an era when women had interesting parts. What was missing was the basic material. No longer were the old Europeans — who came to Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and wrote for women — working. The marvellous women who were writing in that period were gone, too.”
This was true – in the 1960s, there were only a few good female roles for young actresses and they were usually gobbled up by Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda or Natalie Wood; even talented performers such as Ann-Margret and Tuesday Weld struggled. It’s also true that those actresses had an on-screen energy and drive that Mimieux simply lacked; she was immensely likeable, beautiful, warm and capable, but she was very low key. That’s not to say that she shouldn’t have become a bigger star, it’s just to point out that she was a little harder to cast. In hindsight, Mimieux probably needed to play some of the great weepie roles enjoyed by say Margaret Sullavan or Loretta Young at their peak twenty years earlier – indeed, she found huge public acceptance in just such a part in Kildare. But too often she was forced to be The Girl – an object and/or reward rather than someone with agency.
Still, she remained in demand: Mimieux did The Reward (1965), a Western directed by Serge Bourguignon (!) and starring Max von Sydow (!!); Monkeys Go Home (1967), a Disney comedy with Maurice Chevalier; The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967), a heist movie shot in Spain with Stephen Boyd; The Desperate Hours (1967), a TV version of the famous play, as a hostage (George Segal in the old Humphrey Bogart role); Dark of the Sun (1968), a classic guys on a mission film, basically acting as the beard for Rod Taylor and Jim Brown (who have the true love story of the movie) – this was based on a novel by Wilbur Smith who called her performance “brilliant”.
Mimieux found herself in a big hit with Three in an Attic (1969), as one of the three women who kidnap and shag/assault f*boi Christopher Jones; Mimieux was top billed, as Jones’ true love, though it’s really Jones’ film. The movie made a lot of money, and she was as warm, likeable and stunning as ever, but it was from AIP, who were disreputable, so it’s unlikely her career got much of a boost from it.
Serge Bourguignon used her again in The Picasso Summer (1969), as the wife of bored architect Albert Finney. Mimieux said they were given an 18 page script by Ray Bradbury and “were told by the studio to go off and make a movie out of it.” The film was barely seen; it’s a shame, as it was her last feature to have high artistic aspirations.
Mimieux played a CIA agent in Mickey Spillane’s The Delta Factor (1970), and had the lead in a series The Most Deady Game (1970-71), replacing Inger Stevens. If the 1970s was a grim time for second-tier female stars in Hollywood, television offered her better opportunities, as it had for Mimieux’s contemporaries such as Tuesday Weld and Lee Remick. She played the lead in Death Takes a Holiday (1971), and was a witch in Black Noon (1972).
Mimieux returned to features with Skyjacked (1972), a fun hijack thriller where she gets pushed on a swing by Charlton Heston in flashback, and she gasped at fish in The Neptune Factor (1974), which she described as “awful”. Mimieux was unhappy with the female roles on offer saying “the writers, mostly men, don’t know how to handle modern female characters. Maybe they feel threatened. At any rate the women they write are all one dimensional; they have no complexity in their lives. It’s all surface. There’s nothing to play. They’re either sex objects or vanilla pudding.”
To Mimieux’s immense credit, she wrote herself a decent part in in the TV movie, Hit Lady (1974), as an assassin. “It’s in the tradition of the films of the 1940s,” she declared. “The woman is the catalyst for the story rather than an appendage. I’m interested in terrific plots and wonderful characters. That’s what I like to go and see.” Hit Lady was a huge ratings success, and demonstrated again that while Mimieux never became a top star, she had accrued a popularity.
After playing Natacha Rambova in The Legend of Valentino (1975) and a singer in a pointless remake of Journey into Fear (1975), Mimieux got a rarer feature lead in New World’s Jackson County Jail (1976), as a woman who is raped and goes on the lam with Tommy Lee Jones.
Then she made a string of genre TV movies: Snowbeast (1977), Ransom for Alice! (1977), Outside Chance (1978) (a version of Jackson County Jail), Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978), and Disaster on the Coastliner (1979). She returned to features in Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), once more not given nearly enough to do. Mimieux had one more lead in a feature with Circle of Power (1981), an independent thriller about mind control, but few people saw it.
After that it was almost entirely television. She starred in Forbidden Love (1982), Night Partners (1983), and Obsessive Love (1984), and was a regular on the 1985 series Berrenger’s. She co-wrote and co-produced Obsessive Love, playing a woman who becomes obsessed with Simon MacCorkindale, and Mimieux might have really kicked on and had a strong writing-producing career in concert with her acting.
However, she probably had too many other interests to focus on the neverending parade of glass ceilings in ‘70s and ‘80s Hollywood: travelling, art, archaeology. When she married for a third time in 1986 – to Howard Ruby, a tycoon in the world of furnished apartments – she effectively retired. (Husband number two had been director Stanley Donen). Ruby was with her when she died in January 2022.
Yvette Mimieux was probably a star born out of time – she really might have come on under the old studio system of the 1940s and 1950s. Still, over two decades she inspired a string of crushes, worked as a writer and producer, and managed to compile a spectacular array of credits including iconic entries in the genres of sci fi (Time Machine), ‘60s medical dramas (Dr Kildare), teen beach movies (Where the Boys Are), AIP sexploitation (Three in an Attic), ‘70s TV movies (Hit Lady) and Ron Miller era Disney (The Black Hole). That’s pretty good.
