Fay Spain was was your typical B-movie drive-in bad girl - sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette, always bodacious. A tease, a taunt, and a temptress throughout most her career, Fay Spain was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1932, as Lona Fay Spain to R.C. Spain and Arminta Frances Cochran. She headed to New York where she initially found summer stock work and a bit of television exposure. One of her earliest TV appearances was not as an actress but as a contestant on You Bet Your Life (1950), starring Groucho Marx.
By 1956, this fetching starlet was winning episodic roles on the more popular shows of the day, including Perry Mason (1957), Cheyenne (1955) and Gunsmoke (1955). She was also gaining notice on the covers of magazines. This cheesecake attention led directly to her juvenile delinquent debut in Dragstrip Girl (1957) with John Ashley and Steven Terrell, where she immediately established herself as the party girl boys are willing to race cars and fight over. Other equally low-budget films followed, with Teenage Doll (1957), The Crooked Circle (1957), and The Abductors (1957).
She made an aggressive move into higher quality films with Erskine Caldwell's best-seller God's Little Acre (1958) as "Darlin' Jill", another amoral sexpot, and as Rod Steiger's moll in Al Capone (1959), but then it was right back to Grade Z level work with The Beat Generation (1959) co-starring Mamie Van Doren, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve (1960) in which she tempts Martin Milner with the old forbidden fruit routine, and a 1962 Italian spectacle as an evil queen trying to thwart the actions of Hercules. Although Fay made some efforts to return to TV work, her career was pretty much over by the mid-60s. One of her last roles was a bit part as a mafioso matriarch in The Godfather: Part II (1974). Fay Spain died of cancer at age 50 in 1983.
Known For
Credits
Cast Credits
The Man and the City (1971)
Guest starring as Lois Niles
- Episode 1x03: I Should Have Let Him Die (Sep 29, 1971)
Mannix (1967)
Guest starring as Gladys
- Episode 1x11: A Catalogue of Sins (Dec 2, 1967) [Co-Star]
Guest starring as Mrs. Welch
- Episode 6x02: Cry Silence (Sep 24, 1972)
Hogan's Heroes (1965)
Guest starring as Myra
- Episode 4x03: How to Catch a Papa Bear (Oct 12, 1968)
Guest starring as Carla
- Episode 5x14: At Last-Schultz Knows Something (Dec 26, 1969)
The Alaskans (1959)
Guest starring as Janice Collier
- Episode 1x21: Peril at Caribou Crossing (Feb 28, 1960)
Bonanza (1959)
Guest starring as Sue Ellen Terry
- Episode 1x14: The Sisters (Dec 12, 1959) [Special Guest Star]
Rawhide (1959)
Guest starring as Lissa Hobson
- Episode 5x06: Incident of the Lost Woman (Nov 2, 1962)
Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958)
Guest starring as Amy Williams
- Episode 2x03: The Matchmaker (Sep 19, 1959)
Guest starring as Angela Prior
- Episode 2x18: Angela (Jan 9, 1960)
Perry Mason (1957)
Guest starring as Charlotte Lynch
- Episode 1x31: Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Fiery Fingers (May 3, 1958)