Monday, January 3, 2011

Forbidden Planet Deathwatch


Just a month after the tragic passing of Leslie Nielsen, his co-star Anne Francis, best known to people like me as the great Honey West starlet, has died of pancreatic cancer.


Anne's Honey West TV show ran on ABC-TV during 1965 and 1966, based on the popular series of G.G. Fickling detective novels - such as 1957's This Girl For Hire, 1959's Honey in the Flesh, and 1960's Dig A Dead Doll.


Though Anne appeared in many hit films from Bad Day at Black Rock to Barbra Streisand's Funny Girl to Bill Haley's Blackboard Jungle, her greatest claim to fame came as the barefoot and micro-mini-skirted Alta in Forbidden Planet, the forward-thinking science fiction film which provided the template for Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek and everything that came after it.

They say these things come in threes; let's hope Earl "Cookie" Holliman, who got Robby the Robot to manufacture bourbon for him in Forbidden Planet (and also appeared in The Sons of Katie Elder with John Wayne and in Anzio with Robert Mitchum) continues to take good care of himself!

- - JSH

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