A luminous dark-haired beauty who eerily resembled Elizabeth Taylor with the classiness of Grace Kelly, the late Dolores Faith projected a sweet persona and was usually cast as fragile ingénues or vixenish vamps but surprisingly never rose out of Grade Z movies. Dolores, a natural blonde who bucked the trend in the halcyon days of Sandra Dee and the flaxen-haired Barbie Doll by dying her hair black to match her olive skin, began the decade with bit parts as a young bride in All in a Nights Work (1961) and a pie-throwing coed in Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961). The fledgling starlet next grabbed a lead role in the low-budget exploitation movie V.D. (1961), which was also released under the title Damaged Goods. She played a dark and temperamental teenage trollop who seduces her friend’s beau and pays for it by getting the Clap. In the cult sci-fi movie The Phantom Planet (1961) she is a mute inhabitant of the planet Rehton who falls in love with stranded astronaut Dean Fredericks. At first he is treated as a hostile until he rescues the beautiful Faith from the icky creatures the Solarites. In the process, she regains her voice. Faith received a lot of press for this as she was billed as “The Girl from Outer Space” on the film’s posters and from a purported romance with dashing Sean Flynn son of Errol Flynn.
More notoriety came her way when she was selected to be a Hollywood Deb Star in 1962 however it did not lead to any significant movie roles for her and she was back in exploitation land re-teaming with Dean Fredericks in the totally obscure drama Wild Harvest (1962). On television she turned up on Ripchord and Have Gun, Will Travel in 1963. That same year Life magazine published a feature story on her but all it led to is a cameo appearance as a towel-clad American woman in Italy who gently convinces a jealous sergeant to help his rival and girlfriend escape from the Germans in the WWII adventure Shell Shock (1964). It was a respite before Dolores returned to far out roles in two Grade Z sci-fi productions from the directing/writing team of Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce. In Mutiny in Outer Space (1965) she joined Glamazons Pamela Curran and Francine York as astronauts on a space station being terrorized by a creeping alien fungus. As the crew’s bio-chemist, Faith is the one who first discovers the creature. The Human Duplicators (1965) had space visitors trying to take over the world by duplicating the Earth inhabitants as androids. Faith’s next movie was a step down from even the previous two but that is not surprising since schlock horror filmmaker Jerry Warren was brought in to try to save it. House of Black Death (1965) featured Dolores as the innocent girl caught between two battling warlocks, John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr., out to control the Desard family, which Faith is a member of. Dolores Faith married and retired from acting shortly after. She passed away in 1990.
You can read more about Dolores Faith in my book Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood.
In a small note that seems appropriate for this particular blog, the theme from DAMAGED GOODS was performed by The Ventures! I wonder if “Theme from DAMAGED GOODS” appears on any of their early sixties albums?
Honestly, don’t know.
I found this interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Faith
“Most sources state Dolores Faith died February 15, 1990, in Miami, Florida. However, author Tom Lisanti, in his book “Glamour Girls of Sixties Hollywood: Seventy-Five Profiles,” reports that she was living in Florida as of 2006″