Fay Spain was was your typical B-movie drive-in bad girl - sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette, always bodacious. A tease, a taunt, and a temptress throughout most her career, Fay Spain was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1932, as Lona May Spain to R.C. Spain and Arminta Frances Cochran. She headed to New York where she initially found summer stock work and a bit of television exposure. One of her earliest
TV appearances was not as an actress but as a contestant on
You Bet Your Life (1950), starring
Groucho Marx.
By 1956, this fetching starlet was winning episodic roles on the more popular shows of the day, including
Perry Mason (1957),
Cheyenne (1955) and
Gunsmoke (1955). She was also gaining notice on the covers of magazines. This cheesecake attention led directly to her juvenile delinquent debut in
Dragstrip Girl (1957) with
John Ashley and
Steven Terrell, where she immediately established herself as the party girl boys are willing to race cars and fight over. Other equally low-budget films followed, with
Teenage Doll (1957),
The Crooked Circle (1957), and
The Abductors (1957).
She made an aggressive move into higher quality films with
Erskine Caldwell's best-seller
God's Little Acre (1958) as "Darlin' Jill", another amoral sexpot, and as
Rod Steiger's moll in
Al Capone (1959), but then it was right back to Grade Z level work with
The Beat Generation (1959) co-starring
Mamie Van Doren,
The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960) in which she tempts
Martin Milner with the old forbidden fruit routine, and a 1962 Italian spectacle as an evil queen trying to thwart the actions of Hercules. Although Fay made some efforts to return to TV work, her career was pretty much over by the mid-60s. One of her last roles was a bit part as a mafioso matriarch in
The Godfather Part II (1974). Fay Spain died of cancer at age 50 in 1983.