Busy actor Olive Sturgess was known for playing ingénue roles in the 1950s and 60s

Olive Sturgess was a Vancouver schoolgirl with dreams of stardom. Her plan to use Hollywood as a springboard to Broadway never advanced beyond a young woman’s whimsy. She had only a few movie roles and never became a household name.

Ms. Sturgess, who has died at 91, instead found success on the small screen as a character actor. She appeared in hundreds of episodes of radio and television shows, including some of the most popular programs of the 1950s and ‘60s.

The Los Angeles Times compared the petite, blue-eyed blonde to Debbie Reynolds. Ms. Sturgess was often cast as a wide-eyed ingénue, so youthful looking she was still playing teenagers after age 30.

A Los Angeles newspaper critic once described her as “a rare find” with “piquant charm,” who “possesses an engaging iridescent quality and is a first-rate actress.”

Her roles included a chorus girl, a tomboy in blue jeans, and a drunk, an assignment which relied on observation rather than experience – she was teetotal.

Ms. Sturgess appeared on the Donna Reed Show, the Red Skelton Show, and the Jack Benny Program, as well as the detective mystery Further Adventures of Ellery Queen, the spy thriller Girl from U.N.C.L.E., the comedy Petticoat Junction, and the courtroom dramas Ironside and Perry Mason, the latter in which she appeared in an episode titled, The Case of the Sulky Girl.

In a 1960 episode of Thriller, an anthology program of macabre horror hosted by Boris Karloff, she played the youthful girlfriend of Richard Chamberlain, the couple stalked by a creepy murderer. She would later appear with Mr. Chamberlain in an episode of the hospital drama Dr. Kildare, in which he starred.

Westerns were a forte, her wholesomeness pairing with an understated, no-nonsense toughness. Hollywood publicists ballyhooed her as a regular on the rodeo circuit. While she did serve as grand marshall for the rodeo in Whittier, the California city in which she lived and best known as Richard Nixon’s hometown, her knowledge of guns and horses came from lessons learned while under contract to a movie studio.

The boom in television oaters, which peaked in 1959, led to a lot of work in gingham and on horseback for Ms. Sturgess, who appeared on such shows as Bronco, Buckskin, Cheyenne, Lawman, Outlaws, Laramie, The Rebel, The Texan, The Tall Man, Sugarfoot, Wagon Train, The Virginian, Tales of Wells Fargo, Whispering Smith and Have Gun, Will Travel. On a 1960 episode of Maverick, she appeared opposite Roger Moore. She was also cast in two episodes of Bonanza, including Lothario Larkin in 1965 when it was the top-rated show on television.

That same year, she also appeared in her only movie Western, Requiem for a Gunfighter, starring Rod Cameron, a studio quicky of a tired genre that just as quickly wound up on drive-in double bills.

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Her innocent, girl-next-door looks served her well as a foil to such horror stalwarts as Mr. Karloff, Peter Lorre and Vincent Price in The Raven, a 1963 comic gothic horror movie produced and directed by Roger Corman, based loosely on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe. “Strictly a picture for the kiddies and the bird-brained,” Bosley Crowther wrote of it in the New York Times. Another writer described the movie as “beauty and the beasts.”

The movie, shot in just 17 days, became a modest cult favourite thanks to repeated screenings on television, where its broad acting, cheap sets and assorted mayhem such as bondage, hypnotism and resurrection of the dead found an audience. It also afforded Ms. Sturgess an opportunity to act alongside a 25-year-old Jack Nicholson, whose name followed hers on the bill.

“You could feel this talent of his,” she told the author Tom Weaver, “but he wasn’t letting it out yet.”

Olive Dora Sturgess was born on Oct. 8, 1933, to the former Clara Doreatha Collins and Leonard Arthur Sturgess, who worked as a labourer at Pacific Mills in Ocean Falls, an isolated company town on the British Columbia coast about 480 kilometres northwest of Vancouver.

Her father, a tenor, sang at weddings, as well as in stage productions and on the radio, while her namesake aunt, a soprano, was a member of the British National Opera Company. A first cousin, Joan Benham, the aunt’s daughter, had a lengthy stage-and-screen career in Britain, and is best remembered for her portrayal as Lady Prudence Fairfax in Upstairs, Downstairs.

The family moved to Vancouver, where young Olive’s precocious interest in drama led her on stage in Grade 3 as a daffodil, a bluebird, and a fairy. An appearance as a baby chick in a Lyric Theatre performance earned her the nickname Chickie.

While attending Lord Byng High, she took dancing lessons from June Roper, a vaudevillian who had danced with Maurice Chevalier in the Casino de Paris Revue before settling in British Columbia. The girl also enrolled in voice and drama lessons from Elsie Graham, who cast her in the starring role in a Vancouver Children’s Theatre production of Cinderella in 1949.

In 1952, the year she graduated from high school and began studying at the University of British Columbia. Ms. Sturgess appeared weekly on a CBC Radio drama about a family living in the foothills of the Rockies; had leading roles in three Totem Theatre plays, including Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke; acted in a university Summer School of the Theatre production of Ring Around the Moon; found time to perform in a Yuletide pantomime for children; appeared on the cover of Weekend Magazine, a photogravure publication distributed with daily newspapers; and, was crowned Frosh Queen at the university.

The following summer she and her family relocated by train to California, where she attended Whittier College and pursued a career in acting.

After attending several casting calls without success, her fortunes changed one day when she stepped off an elevator only to be immediately confronted by a man who demanded: “Are you an actress?” She stuttered a reply in the affirmative, did a reading, and got the part. Only later did she learn she had been approached because another actress was late, so the frustrated casting director made a $5 bet he could find someone just as good out in the hallway.

She found roles on radio and television, including Meet Mr. McNutley with Ray Milland and the sitcom My Favorite Husband with Joan Caulfield, as well as on stage, where she had the title role in Gentle Lunatic, a comedy in which a young woman is deemed insane for performing acts of kindness, including inviting a newsvendor, a bootblack and a laundryman to a private party.

In 1954, she did a screen test for Universal-International at the same time as a young Korean War veteran by the name of Clint Eastwood. Both were signed to contracts and posed for publicity shots together in bathing suits. The pair later both appeared in an episode of Rawhide.

Her first screen appearance was in a 16-minute featurette, Leave it to Harry, in which she plays a student reporter for a college newspaper who tags along with indefatigable band leader Harry James for a day.

An uncredited role in Lady Godiva of Coventry and a supporting role as a daughter in The Kettles in the Ozarks, the eighth instalment in the rustic comedy series, were early movie appearances.

At 21, she had her first starring television role in a Front Row Center production of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Ah! Wilderness. She also appeared in Tender is the Night and The Teacher and Hector Hodges on the show, which broadcast live one-hour versions of Broadway plays.

While many of her early television credits include dramatic roles, her big break came when she became a regular on The Bob Cummings Show, a sitcom.

In 1964, Ms. Sturgess married the musician Dale Louis Anderson, a percussionist with the U.S. Air Force Drum and Bugle Corps who became a mallet specialist heard on more than a hundred movie and television scores. After marrying, she greatly reduced her appearances to raise a family. Her husband died of malignant mesothelioma in 2003, aged 73.

In January, her California home was one of the 2,000 structures lost to an out-of-control wildfire and she joined tens of thousands of people fleeing the Palisades Fire, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Ms. Sturgess died of natural causes in Los Angeles on Feb. 19. She leaves a daughter, a son and a granddaughter. She was predeceased by a brother.

Though she had been retired from acting for a half-century, she regularly received fan mail, especially from horror aficionados interested in The Raven. As it turned out, the set was a place for the veteran actors to have some fun at her expense.

“In one scene, I am locked in a stock,” she said in 1963. “I was in it when the break for lunch came. They all just walked off and waved and said they’d see me later.”

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