The Last Starlet: An Interview with 1950's Bad Girl of the Silver Screen, Mamie Van Doren

Discovered by Howard Hughes at 18 and poised to become Universal Studios’ answer to Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren made a name for herself in the ’50s playing big screen bad girls. Now 90 and as daring as ever, Van Doren opens up about sexism, censorship, and that time she almost hooked up with Marlene Dietrich.

Often captured bewitching audiences beneath a shock of icy blond hair, the points on her bullet bra sharp as daggers, there was nothing safe about Van Doren, and the censors knew it. A decade before the sexual revolution, she had the nerve to prioritize her own pleasure, saying and doing what she wanted, and she’s still that way today.

Born Joan Lucille Olander, she grew up on a farm in South Dakota during the Great Depression. Her family had no electricity or running water and scarlet fever, polio, and tuberculosis were rampant in her community. “Only the strong survived,” Van Doren recalls. “Every day, I saw a hearse taking someone away. The whole family [next door] was wiped out from scarlet fever.”

And as her screen time grew, her voluptuous figure and provocative moves soon provoked the ire of the censorship board trying to make films of the day adhere to the “Hays Code.” According to the Hays guidelines, “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” This meant no “unnecessary passion,” interracial relationships, homosexuality, and of course, none of Van Doren’s signature pelvic thrusts.

But even the horrors of war couldn’t prepare Van Doren for the date she went on with Burt Reynolds not long after returning home. In a misguided attempt to seduce her, he invited her to his set to watch him perform his own stunts. “That, to me, wasn’t very impressive. I had just gotten back from Vietnam. That’s the genuine thing,” she says. “He jumps through a window and gets lots of applause and I’m thinking, ‘I’m bored to death.

Mamievandoren This is a really good interview.

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