Carol Lynley, who has died of a heart attack aged 77, emerged as a young star in the late 1950s, when Hollywood was becoming aware of the growing teen audience who identified with new actors such as Lynley, Sandra Dee, Tuesday Weld and Sue Lyon, who all played similar coming-of-age roles.
Lynley’s poignant portrayal of a 15-year-old girl who finds herself pregnant and seeking an abortion in Blue Denim (1959, released in the UK as Blue Jeans) broke new ground, despite Hollywood’s lingering puritanical mores. The main differences between the play, by James Leo Herlihy, in which Lynley had appeared triumphantly the year before on Broadway, and the film were that, on screen, the word abortion is never uttered and the girl has the baby.
Later on, in the adult phase of her career, Lynley was a member of the stellar cast trying to survive when a luxury liner capsizes in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Before the ship is hit by disaster, her character, Nonnie Parry, the onboard singer, delivers the Oscar-winning song The Morning After (though Lynley was actually dubbed by Renée Armand).
Dressed in an orange top and hot pants, Lynley spends much of the movie clinging to the wreck, which was mostly shot on a sound stage inside a huge tank. “It was the most physically demanding role you can possibly imagine,” she recalled. “We had to swim underwater, climb across tiny catwalks, walk over flames. They hosed us down at least 20 times a day. And there were no safety precautions for the first two weeks of shooting. I’d be up there on the catwalk and if I slipped, it was six storeys straight down through flames to a concrete floor. I went through 10 or 15 pairs of shorts because they kept shrinking.”
Born Carole Ann Jones in New York, she was the daughter of Frances (nee Felch) and Cyril Jones. After her parents divorced, when she was a toddler, her mother worked as a waitress until Carol was in demand as a child model, becoming the family’s primary breadwinner. This led her into acting, and she appeared on Broadway in Graham Greene’s family drama The Potting Shed (1957) and Blue Denim (1958).
Lynley’s film career began in Walt Disney’s The Light in the Forest (1958), wearing period costume as a servant in 18th-century Pennsylvania. It was then that 20th Century Fox offered her a contract, casting her in ingenue parts in three pictures in 1959, opposite three of their promising young male stars: Brandon deWilde in Blue Denim, Gary Crosby in Holiday for Lovers and Fabian in Hound-Dog Man.
Lynley made the cover of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Life and Seventeen as well as doing TV commercials for hair dye and toothpaste. She had also begun making guest star appearances in television series, starting with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in an episode directed by Robert Altman, The Young One (1957), in which she played a rebellious girl who will do anything to escape being raised by her domineering aunt.
The studio began to give her more mature roles, such as the female lead in Return to Peyton Place (1961), as the author of the scandalous novel who is in love with her married publisher (Jeff Chandler). The rather lame sequel to Peyton Place did not do much to boost her career.
Lynley managed to show acting range despite rather limited parts, such as a rival to Joanne Woodward in the title role of The Stripper; the reluctant target of a lecherous landlord (Jack Lemmon) in Under the Yum Yum Tree; and a psychiatric patient in Shock Treatment, all in 1963. She was well cast as the “blonde bombshell” star Jean Harlow in Harlow (1965), a cheaply made biopic, which got the better of the glossier Paramount production starring Carroll Baker released at the same time with the same title and subject.
Perhaps Lynley’s most prestigious film was the mystery thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), one of Otto Preminger’s better late films. As an American single mother in London whose four-year-old daughter has disappeared from her nursery school, Lynley held her own among an excellent British cast that included Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward and Anna Massey. In the same year, Lynley posed nude for Playboy magazine and began a relationship with the broadcaster David Frost.
Despite the decline of her film career in the 1970s and 80s, when she was forced to appear in shoestring straight-to-video movies, Lynley continued to get work in TV series such as Kojak, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
Years later, when she was approached by a potential biographer, she explained: “I’ve never been in a scandal. I’ve never been caught running naked down a highway. I’ve not tried to shoot anybody. Nobody’s ever tried to shoot me. My child is legitimate ... I’ve never been to Betty Ford ... No porn ... No drug addictions ... I’ve outlived three of my doctors. So if you’re going to write a juicy book, you’ve got a problem.”
She is survived by her daughter, Jill, from her marriage to the publicist Michael Selsman, which ended in 1964 in divorce.
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