The performing profession of Gayle Hunnicutt, who has died aged 80, might be outlined in two acts. As an up-and-coming starlet in Hollywood she was usually forged for her gorgeous magnificence. Then, after marrying the British actor David Hemmings, she moved to the UK, the place she performed large elements in two main tv mini-series, The Golden Bowl (1972) and Fall of Eagles (1974).
After a divorce she married the journalist and editor Sir Simon Jenkins, and alongside her performing profession grew to become a fixture of the British social scene. She might, although, be greatest remembered for the ultimate three seasons of Dallas, from 1989 to 1991, wherein she performed Vanessa Beaumont, an English aristocrat whose long-ago affair with JR Ewing produced a son he had by no means identified existed.
Hunnicutt was born in Texas, not removed from Dallas in Fort Price. Her father, Sam, was a colonel within the military; her mom, Mary (nee Dickerson), gave delivery to Gayle whereas her husband was serving in New Caledonia throughout the second world battle. Her mother and father didn’t assist her need to go to varsity, however she received a scholarship to the College of California, Los Angeles, and paid for her time there with part-time work whereas learning English and theatre.
Noticed in a university manufacturing by a expertise scout from Warner Brothers, she made her debut on the tv naval comedy Mister Roberts on the age of 23 in 1966, after which in Roger Corman’s Peter Fonda/Nancy Sinatra basic movie Wild Angels, a couple of San Pedro bike gang.
As soon as requested whom she would most need to appear like, Hunnicutt replied Audrey Hepburn, whose magnificence, like hers, was usually described as “porcelain” and even “chilly”. However Hepburn additionally projected a sure vulnerability, whereas Hunnicutt appeared to hold her magnificence naturally. Fairly than Hollywood’s typecasting of her as a magnificence queen, she wanted elements that performed on a distinction between fragile magnificence and steely character.
She caught discover in 1967 for her function as a lady attempting to con Jed Clampett out of his fortune in a two-part episode of The Beverly Hillbillies on TV, after which taking part in reverse James Garner within the movie Marlowe (1969) because the older sister, Mavis Wald, defending secrets and techniques in a movie based mostly on Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister.
By then she had met Hemmings, at a celebration on the actor Peter Lawford’s seashore home. She described it as love at first sight, and so they married in 1968. Hemmings characterised them because the “poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton”, and though Gayle “all the time thought that was foolish”, her new husband appeared intent on replicating the battle of the Taylor/Burton relationship. Inside three months of the marriage he started a really public affair with the actor Samantha Eggar, but regardless of his serial infidelity they remained married, and moved to Britain, the place their son, Nolan, was born.
She co-starred with Hemmings in In Fragment of Worry (1970) , after which was directed by him in Operating Scared (1972) with Robert Powell. In 1973 she performed in Scorpio, wherein Michael Winner wasted the skills of Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon, then once more alongside Hemmings in Voices, which was much less attention-grabbing than her subsequent horror movie, The Legend of Hell Home.
What she actually gained from being in Britain was theatre alternatives, and in 1973 she was in fellow-American Michael Rudman’s Hampstead theatre manufacturing of Peter Handke’s Trip Throughout Lake Constance, alongside Alan Howard, Jenny Agutter, Nigel Hawthorne and Nicola Pagett.
In 1972 she additionally starred on the small display within the BBC’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl as Charlotte Stant, taking part in, for the primary time, a transatlantic character. She adopted up with one other success on the BBC because the Tsarina Alexandra in Fall of Eagles (1974), and that yr additionally performed in Nuits Rouges (aka Shadowman in its English dubbed model), George Franju’s homage to the fictional felony genius Fantômas, wherein she was memorable in an Irma Vep-style bodysuit being chased by police throughout the Paris rooftops.
She revisited Fantômas in three episodes of the eponymous 1980 French mini-series, directed by Claude Chabrol and Luis Buñuel’s son, Juan Luis. Within the BBC’s 1978 TV movie Dylan she performed Liz Reitel, a lady having an affair with Ronald Lacey’s Dylan Thomas, consuming his means by way of his ill-fated remaining American tour.
Hunnicutt had divorced Hemmings in 1974, and married Jenkins in 1978, by which period she was a notable presence on stage and in high quality tv roles. In London in 1979 she ranged from taking part in Hedda within the Watermill theatre’s manufacturing of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to being Peter Pan on the Shaftesbury theatre. That yr she additionally starred in a double episode of The Return of the Saint with Ian Ogilvy, which was later repackaged as a TV film.
She would play in one other Saint TV film, The Brazilian Connection (1989) with Simon Dutton as Simon Templar. She additionally returned to Raymond Chandler as a femme fatale reverse Powers Boothe in an episode of the mini-series Marlowe, Non-public Eye in 1983. Within the first episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984) reverse Jeremy Brett, she performed Holmes’ nice feminine rival, Irene Adler. In 1985 she starred as Donna Lloyd with Gene Hackman and Matt Dillon in Arthur Penn’s thriller movie, Goal.
Her most private mission was a two-hander, The Life and Loves of Edith Wharton, which debuted in 1995 on the Hampstead theatre and toured for a few years afterwards; based on Jenkins, she recognized with the troubled Anglo-American author. Later she performed the author Mary Wollstonecraft in one other two-hander, The Two Marys. Her final display function got here in a 1999 episode of CI5: The New Professionals.
Having written a e book referred to as Well being and Magnificence in Motherhood in 1984, 20 years later she printed Dearest Virginia, a transferring assortment of her father’s love letters written whereas he was serving within the South Pacific.
She and Jenkins divorced in 2009; her sale of the Primrose Hill home they’d lived in for 3 many years grew to become an episode of a 2012 actuality present, Promoting London.
She is survived by Nolan, one other son, Edward, from her marriage to Jenkins, and 5 grandchildren, Poppy, Theo, Oscar, Sprint and Nia.
