Everything but the snake looks real! Debra Paget in Fritz Lang’s INDIAN EPIC.
Debra Paget (born August 19, 1933) is an American actress and entertainer who rose to prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s in a variety of feature films, including 20th Century Fox’s epic Demetrius and the Gladiators, starring Victor Mature, Jay Robinson and Susan Hayward, a sequel to The Robe. She also appeared in Love Me Tender, the film début of Elvis Presley.
Paget was born in Denver, Colorado as Debralee Griffin, one of five siblings born to Frank H. and Margaret Griffin. The family moved from Denver to Los Angeles in the 1930s to be close to the developing film industry. Margaret, a former actress, was determined that Debra and her siblings would also make their careers in show business. Three of Paget’s siblings, Mareta (“Judith Gibson”, “Teala Loring”), Lezlie (“Lisa Gaye”), and Frank (“Ruell Shayne”) all entered show business.
Paget had her first professional job at age 8, and acquired some stage experience at 13 when she acted in a 1946 production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. From 1950-56 she took part in six original radio plays for Family Theater. During those same years, she read parts in four episodes of Lux Radio Theater, sharing the microphone with such actors as Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Cesar Romero, Ronald Colman, and Robert Stack. The latter set included dramatizations of two of her feature films.
Paget’s first notable film role was as “Teena Riconti”, girlfriend of the character played by Richard Conte, in Cry of the City, a 1948 film noir directed by Robert Siodmak. Fresh out of high school in 1949, she acted in three other films before being signed by 20th Century-Fox. Her first vehicle for Fox was the successful Broken Arrow with James Stewart. Paget played an Indian maiden, Sonseeahray (“Morningstar”), who gives up her life to save Stewart’s character.
Paget again played an Indian Princess ‘Appearing Day’ in White Feather (1955) along with Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter and later at MGM replaced Anne Bancroft in The Last Hunt. In 1953, wearing a blonde wig, she auditioned along with, among others, Anita Ekberg and Irish McCalla, for the starring role in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, which went to McCalla. Paget went on to starring roles in a variety of films.
The Hollywood studio system dominated American feature film production in the first half of the 20th century. Under it, an actor would sign an exclusive contract to make films for a major studio, such as Fox. The system that worked well at first for Paget as her early Fox films did well, so the studio bolstered her film career. During the year after Princess of the Nile was released, the fan mail Paget received at 20th Century-Fox was topped only by that for Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable.
During this time that she appeared in what would become her signature role — Lilia the water girl, in Cecil B. DeMille’s monumental production of The Ten Commandments – Fox lent her to Paramount. In 1955 she also broke the exclusivity clause of her contract; White Feather (1955) was not a Fox film. The studio dropped her contract and The River’s Edge (1957) was the last film she made for Fox.
After that, her career began to decline. She was typically cast in exotic roles such as South Sea Island maidens or middle-eastern harem girls. She traveled to Germany in 1959 to join the cast of Fritz Lang’s two-film adventure saga (called in America Journey to the Lost City) in a role that recalled her Shalimar/Taura of Princess of the Nile. Like the Egyptian epic, “Lost City” is remembered chiefly for her energetic dance scenes. In 1960 she starred as Laura Ashley in the Rawhide episode “Incident of the Garden of Eden”. She acted in a pair of films shot in Italy. Her final feature film was The Haunted Palace, a 1963 horror film directed by Roger Corman for American International Pictures. She did television work throughout her career. Her last performance in this medium came in a December 1965 episode of Burke’s Law. She retired from entertainment in 1965, after marrying a wealthy oil executive, by whom she had one son, her only child.[citation needed]
Paget became a born-again Christian. She hosted her own show, An Interlude with Debra Paget on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a Christian network, in the early 1990s, and also was involved in Praise the Lord. She occasionally appears on TBN as a guest.
In 1987, the Motion Picture & Television Fund presented Paget with its Golden Boot Award, which is awarded to those actors, writers, directors and stunt crew who “have contributed so much to the development and preservation of the western tradition in film and television”.
with John Derek from the trailer for The Ten Commandments (1956)
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