While I find my sea-legs en Amerique, here’s one I prepared earlier.
Since posting about my obsession with/craving for B-movie starlet Kim Parker from FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (“She has an unusual quality of intelligence,” said Fiona. That must be what I’m responding to), I’ve heard from my chum Diarmid, who runs The Unsung Joe, an astonishing investigation into the world of the bit-part player. Although Kim played actually roles with character names and dialogue, Diarmid has kindly dug up the dirt on this neglected — and mistreated — figure.
A small titbit to fuel your unhealthy obsession with Kim Parker, from an article from 1958:
“She [Carpenter] came to Britain in 1945 as a refugee from Vienna after being interned in a German concentration camp.”
I wonder what she did to annoy the Nazis. Jewish? Communist? Who knows?
The quote comes from a story about her attempt to divorce her husband, on the ground that he’d had an affair with someone called ‘Sabrina’. The proceedings didn’t go as smoothly as she’d planned, incidentally, as this story from a year later shows:
“COURT ORDERS ACTRESS: RETURN TO HUSBAND
A British divorce court Judge today ordered Austrian-born actress Kim Parker to return to her Canadian husband within 14 days.
The court granted a decree for restitution of conjugal rights to the Husband, actor Paul Carpenter who lives in Britain. Miss Parker did not
contest the suit. Attorneys told the court she has started divorce proceedings against Carpenter in Nevada.
In 1958 Miss Parker started a divorce suit in London charging Carpenter committed adultery with Sabrina, a singer and showgirl with a 41-inch bosom. Sabrina — whose real name is Norma Sykes — intervened in the suit to deny the allegation. Carpenter denied it too and Miss Parker withdrew the suit.”
Fancy that: a decree for restitution of conjugal rights. If you ever find yourself wondering whether 1970s feminism *really* changed things for women, just remind yourself that a judge used to be able to command a woman to stop being difficult and go and have sex with her husband.
Anyway, that’s all that there seems to be on her in my usual places.
Thanks, Diarmid! A sobering and strange story.
Sabrina, incidentally, appeared in several ST TRINIANS films, playing a saucy schoolgirl, generally without benefit of dialogue. Not so much an actress as an exhibit.
Buxom — to the point of caricature — as she was, I can’t understand any man preferring her to Kim.
“Maybe she was better in bed?” suggests Fiona.
“Well, he couldn’t really use that as an excuse for cheating,” I suggest, “since how would he know?”
shadowplay 