Barbara Steele
Barbara Steele (born 29 December 1937) is an English film actress. She is best known for starring in Italian gothic horror films of the 1960s. Her breakthrough role came in Italian director Mario Bava's "Black Sunday" (1960).
Steele starred in a string of horror films, including "The Horrible Dr. Hichcock" (1962), "The Ghost" (1963) directed by Riccardo Freda, "The Long Hair of Death" (1964) and Roger Corman's 1961 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Pit and the Pendulum," among others. She also starred in "Castle of Blood" (1964), "Terror-Creatures from the Grave" and "Nightmare Castle" (both 1965) and Curse of the "Crimson Altar" (1968).
She guest-starred on various British television shows including the spy drama, Danger Man starring Patrick McGoohan. She made her American television debut in 1960 as Dolores in the "Daughter of Illusion" episode of the ABC series, "Adventures in Paradise", starring Gardner McKay. In that same year, she was replaced in the Elvis Presley film "Flaming Star" after a disagreement with director Don Siegel. In 1961, she appeared as Phyllis in the "Beta Delta Gamma" episode of CBS's Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She also had an important role in Federico Fellini's celebrated "8½" in 1963.
Steele was cast as Julia Hoffman in the 1991 remake of the 1960s ABC television series, "Dark Shadows." In 2010, she was a guest star in the Dark Shadows audio drama, "The Night Whispers".
In 2010, actor-writer Mark Gatiss interviewed Steele about her role in "Black Sunday" (1960) for his BBC documentary series "A History of Horror". In 2014 she appeared in the directorial debut of Ryan Gosling's drama-fantasy thriller film "Lost River", in which she portrayed the character Belladonna in a supporting role.
Bonds of Steele
- by Cark McGuire for Bondage Life issue 11
The Queeen of '60s horror films added a new dimension to the role of victim.
Those green eyes have mesmerized many a horror movie fan. There was always a touch of the frightening in Barbara Steele, that haunting British beauty whose most memorable films, ironically, were Italian and who portrayed a long succession of witches, vampires, murderesses, and other dark ladies so convincingly throughout the 1960s that critic John Brosman labelled her "the queen of horror." But if she could inspire dread, she could portray it as well, and some of her best scenes have her as a tied, helpless victim—yet, in her vulnerability, still able to project a kind of defiance. Bound or free, this is not a woman to trifle with. For Steele as victim, recall "Black Sunday" (1960), her first major role, in which, as the sorceress Princess Asa, she is roped to a post, tortured with a spiked demons mask, and at the movie's end, trussed to a ladder and hoisted to her death on a flaming pyre. Or "Nightmare Castle" (1965), which features her chained to a dungeon wall with her adulterous lover and tied to a bed and whipped. Or, from the same year, "L'Armata Brancaleone," never seen in this country, in which she is tied half-naked to a post and flogged. Miss Steele registered "a veritable triumph in the role of the sadomasochistic Byzantine princess," as critic Michel Perrot expressed it. "We are not about to forget the extraordinary flogging scene between Barbara Steele and Vittorio Gassman...." Nor are we about to forget the arch-heroine of horror films, loveliest when most helpless. Brava, Barbara,bellissima.
External links
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Barbara_Steele ]
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