| Maila Nurmi's
image is known all over the world,though she has rarely been given her
due as its source.Even at the height of what was worldwide fame,Nurmi's
work was unseeable outside greater L. A.; but still she managed to present
the world with a lasting archetype of sex,
death and humor that survives to this day.An aspiring actress, chorus girl and cheesecake model,who posed for Vargas and worked with a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe, Nurmi's moment came in 1953 when she attended Lester Horton's annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in Hollywood dressed as the then unnamed ghoul woman from Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons. "I bound my bosoms, so that I was
flat chested", Nurmi says, "I got a wig, and painted my body a kind of
a mauve white pancake with a little
lavender powder so that I looked as though I'd been entombed".
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| An instant sensation which spawned
fan clubs all over the world and led to Nurmi's being featured in a multi-page
spread in LIFE Magazine, Vampira alsoattracted the
attention Ed Wood and his star performer, horror
great Bela Lugosi.It was Lugosi who saw Nurmi on TV and told Wood he'd
like to work with her some day.Wood, honored Lugosi'srequest
years later,when Nurmi's fame had waned thanks to what she terms a blacklisting, and after Lugosi died, leaving behind some unexploited movie footage, Wood cast Nurmi as Lugosi's undead wife in an unlikely zombies-of-the-stratosphere scenario,and the schlock-horror classic Plan 9 From Outer Space was born
At the time, I thought it was horrible,
Nurmi says of a film some have called the worst movie ever made.
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Like any good, undead creature
of the night,Vampira will
rose again when Tim Burton chronicled the life of her Plan 9 director in "Ed Wood", starring Johnny Depp as Wood and super- model Lisa Marie as Nurmi. As for Nurmi (who is retired in Los Angeles, and whose painted self-portraits of Vampira are much sought after collector's items), she's undergone something of a conversion experience In contrast to her former low opinion of him, she now sides with the smaller but more passionate group that defends Ed Wood as a low budget visionary, who made up for his lack of craft with a passionate commitment to the creative act. He wasn't as dumb as I thought he was, Nurmi says wryly. I was probably the dumb one. He was an auteur; I know that now. In those days, I didn't even know what that meant |
| Ironically, thanks to the perishable
nature of 50s TV, it is through Plan 9 From Outer Space (plus a thousand
imitators,
including one prominent mistress of the dark who shall remain nameless) that Nurmi's Vampira survives. Appalled by her dialogue,Nurmi begged Wood to let her perform lineless, and the result was a sleepwalking character dressed likeVampira,but who was actually what Nurmi calls Maila in an alpha state. |
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Filmography
(1958) Plan 9 from Outer
Space
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