Virginia Leith, a model and actress who starred in Stanley Kubrick’s debut feature Fear and Desire, has died. She was 94.
She passed away in Palm Springs on November 4 after a brief illness, according to family spokesperson Jane Chalmers.
Leith met Kubrick when he was a photographer and shot her for the cover of Look magazine. Once Kubrick made the transition to film, he cast her in Fear and Desire as a “half-animal” peasant girl captured and eventually killed by a soldier played by Paul Mazursky. The 1953 war film generated lukewarm interest at the box office, and after distributor Joseph Burstyn died, it was taken out of circulation.
Kubrick was no fan of the finished product and was said to have destroyed the original negative. He released a statement through Warner Bros., calling the movie “a bumbling amateur film exercise.”
In 1954 Leith became a contract player for 20th Century Fox...
She passed away in Palm Springs on November 4 after a brief illness, according to family spokesperson Jane Chalmers.
Leith met Kubrick when he was a photographer and shot her for the cover of Look magazine. Once Kubrick made the transition to film, he cast her in Fear and Desire as a “half-animal” peasant girl captured and eventually killed by a soldier played by Paul Mazursky. The 1953 war film generated lukewarm interest at the box office, and after distributor Joseph Burstyn died, it was taken out of circulation.
Kubrick was no fan of the finished product and was said to have destroyed the original negative. He released a statement through Warner Bros., calling the movie “a bumbling amateur film exercise.”
In 1954 Leith became a contract player for 20th Century Fox...
- 11/13/2019
- by Anita Bennett
- Deadline Film + TV
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