Obituary - Suzanna Leigh, actress and Elvis co-star

Died: December 11, 2017

SUZANNA Leigh, who has died aged 72 after a long battle with cancer, was an actress and star of film and television.

Her career took off in the 1960s but it wasn’t born out of a desire to escape the poverty that so many actors cited. Her father was a professional gambler and her mother a millionaire property developer, the family owning homes in Mayfair and a large country farmhouse.

Yet, once she realised her ambition, at the age of five, there was no stopping the star who would go on to work – and sometimes play – alongside the likes of Elvis, Steve McQueen and Michael Caine.

Born Sandra Eileen Anne Smith in Berkshire, she decided she was going to be a star at the age of five. “I was dyslexic,” she wrote in her 2000 autobiography. "Years ago they didn't call it dyslexic - they just said you were thick. So I had to work out very early what I wanted to be in spite of it."

Her father (who died when Leigh was six) had told his daughter that Vivien Leigh was her godmother, so at the age of 11 she strolled round the corner from her mother's house in Cadogan Square to Vivien Leigh's house in Eaton Place and introduced herself. "She said she had known my father, though she had been to hundreds of christenings and didn't remember mine. But she was so fantastic to me. She said that so many of my dreams seemed like hers. She said she didn't mind a bit if I used her name.”

Suzanna Leigh grew up with the belief she could make it as an actress and had something of the gambling confidence of her father. At the age of 13 she made her film debut as an extra in 1958’s Tom Thumb;

later she studied at drama school but gave up after just two terms. She was too anxious to tackle the world out there. “In those days it was all based on youth,” she declared. “There was no chance in Hollywood if you turned up at 22," she recalls.

The teenage Leigh landed bit parts in The Saint, graduated to leading glamour roles, and then had her own television series in France Trois étoiles en Touraine. One day, her agent rang to tell her that Hal Wallis, the famous Hollywood producer, was in England looking for the new Shirley MacLaine. Leigh rushed off the Paris set, jumped on a plane to London, rushed to the Dorchester where he was staying and banged on his door to declare “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

And he was. Wallis signed the 19-year-old to a contract and her first film for Hollywood was Boeing Boeing with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis.

The stunning actress’s next film, another Hall Wallis production, would see her work with Elvis. “I was an incredible fan of Elvis, and then Hal said you'll be filming it in Hawaii. Wow. Elvis was a fabulous actor, very underrated by a lot of the conventional theatre people." In the film, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Leigh played his assistant and pretended to be married to ward off Elvis' romantic advances.

But in real life Colonel Tom Parker believed Leigh had gotten too close to Elvis, although the actress maintains she and the singer were never lovers, just very good friends.

That was bad luck but worse was to come. The Screen Guild Association at the time decided they had had enough of Brit actors in Hollywood and Leigh could not find work. She returned to the UK but the days of Hollywood glamour and exotic location were gone. The late Sixties British film industry was one of tight pockets. Leigh played a stewardess in the 1965 film version of the stage farce Boeing Boeing and a pop singer recovering from exhaustion on an island infested with killer insects in the rather unimaginatively titled The Deadly Bees.

The actress then found herself working on several Hammer horror productions, including The Lost, in which she played a passenger on an ill-fated voyage besieged by carnivorous seaweed and pirates.

In 1971, Leigh appeared in Lust for a Vampire playing a gym teacher puzzled as to why her students kept disappearing, just as she was puzzled as to why the script was so silly. Perhaps her nadir was an appearance in the dreadful musical comedy of 1974, Son of Dracula opposite Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr.

Her personal life also tested the lady’s tenacity and survivor instinct. A ten-year relationship with Tim Hue-Williams led to the birth of their daughter, at Ascot in 1972. But Hue-Williams deserted her for a rich heiress and denied paternity of their child, now grown-up actress Natalia Leigh Denny.

Leigh, now out of acting work and with a baby, struggled. She lost her home in Belgravia (there was no support from her mother as they had never been close), and then moved on, through a flat in Regent's Park that was sold over her head, then into an ex-council flat, relying on benefit at various times.

She took whatever work came along. The dyslexic actress certainly saw the irony in her stint selling the Encyclopedia Britannica at Heathrow Airport. "Being dyslexic I'd say to people things like `I won't bore you with the books' – but if they took gold bindings I'd make quite a lot of money."

In 2000, Leigh came back fighting with her autobiography, Paradise, Suzanna Style, which revealed a woman who was indestructibly optimistic. Yet, while Suzanna Leigh could beat off most challenges in life, cancer proved to be conqueror.

She is survived by her daughter.

BRIAN BEACOM