Barbara Shelley

Born on August 15, 1933 in the British capital, Barbara Kowin became fond of the fantastic genre since she was a child. “My father collected science fiction magazines and we read them together,” she recalled in an interview. She became interested in acting soon after, during adolescence, in the difficult times of the postwar period. “I was really shy back then, but when I went on stage I felt like I could take on the world,” she has declared. One of her teachers advises her to work as a model, because due to her enormous photogenicity, she had a chance to succeed.

After appearing in Vogue and other magazines, he was recruited to shoot Ballata Tragica in Italy , a forgotten second-rate crime story. Installed in the Mediterranean country, she participates in various films with big stars, such as Totò ( Destinazione Piovarolo, Totò, Pepino and the outlaws ), and Alberto Sordi , Vittorio de Sica and Gloria Swanson ( My son Nero ). She returns to her country to star in The Cat Girl , a B-series film where she plays a woman who, due to a family curse, is possessed by the spirit of a leopard. A few years later she would film another feline horror product, The Shadow of the Cat ., which despite the title has nothing to do with it, since it revolves around a vengeful and violent cat.

She also led the cast of the most influential British B-series production in later horror, The Town of the Damned , where she plays a doctor’s wife. After an inexplicable event –all living beings in the small town where they live remain unconscious for hours–, she discovers that she has become pregnant, which would be normal except that the same thing has happened to all the fertile women in the area. Children are born with light eyes and albino hair, of enormous intelligence and without emotions. Shot shortly after Invasion of the Body Snatchers , which reflected the fear of Soviet invasion during the Cold War, this film can be interpreted in a similar way, or as a metaphor for the recent confrontation with Germany (the director,Wolf Rilla , had to flee from the Nazis). John Carpenter shot a poor remake in 1995.

She began her journey in Hammer with the war thriller The Camp on Blood Island , where she plays Kate, a widow who tries to save prisoners from a Japanese concentration camp during World War II, as the sadistic commanding officer he will annihilate everyone as soon as the news of his country’s defeat arrives. She went on to one of the horror films the company specialized in, The Gorgon , one of the best works of the most prominent director, Terence Fisher , with the two great stars, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing .. She plays the nurse to Dr. Namaroff (Cushing), who is apparently hiding the person responsible for a series of murders where the victims have inexplicably been turned into stone figures. Since her character is more important than it seems at first glance, Barbara Shelley ends up stealing the movie.

This explains why fans of the genre fell in love with it, and the company’s bosses, who immediately placed it in its most emblematic saga, in Dracula, Prince of Darkness , in which it repeats with Lee as actor and Fisher as director. The actress embroiders her character, the demure Helen, who after converting to vampirism becomes a sensual beast. “It was my best work,” she recalls. “The creepiest moment I remember is when Helen discovers the body of her husband dead from her, blood dripping from her slashed throat onto Dracula’s ashes. Disgusting, creepy, terrifying…”.

He also does notable work in Don Sharp ‘s Rasputin , again with Lee, as the monk who manipulated the wife of Tsar Nicholas. There, Barbara Shelley plays Sonia, the tsarina’s lady-in-waiting, who becomes the sinister protagonist’s servant because of one of her spells. During filming she suffered a spectacular fall, in which she hit her head, for which she had to be off work for a few days.

He said goodbye to the producer with What happened then? , third installment of Dr. Quatermass, who on this occasion investigates a five-million-year-old alien spaceship found in the London Underground works. This time it was up to her to interpret Barbara Judd, assistant to an anthropologist who collaborates in the investigations. “He had me completely in love”, she came to declare about the actress Roy Ward Baker , director of the tape.

From the 70s, he took refuge in television, taking part in numerous British series. Fans of the fantastic especially remember her work as Sorasta, an alien from the planet Sarn, who loses her home as a result of a volcano eruption in the emblematic series Doctor Who , in 1984. After playing the protagonist’s wife ( Richard Harris ) in Inspector Maigret , and filming the little-known miniseries The Dark Angel , he retired from acting, devoting himself to interior architecture.

In 2007 he survived a stroke. “It has left me quite bad, but I manage,” she commented in an interview. Single, childless, Barbara Shelley is an example of discretion, since she is not known for sentimental relationships.