"Vampira" Joins The Great Beyond

Interesting life:

In the early days of television, when horror movies were often campy by nature, actress Maila Nurmi created the character Vampira, a glamorous ghoul who as hostess of late-night fright films in the 1950s layered on her own brand of camp.

Vampira played with her pet tarantula, gave gruesome recipes for vampire cocktails and bathed in a boiling caldron. With a knack for the double-entendre and the requisite blood-chilling scream, Vampira was a hit.

The character won Nurmi short-lived fame and a dedicated cult following. Nurmi claimed Vampira was also the uncredited inspiration for later ghoulish yet glamorous female characters in film and television, including Elvira.

Nurmi, who also appeared in the 1959 Edward D. Wood Jr. movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space," was found dead in her Hollywood home Jan. 10. The cause of death was still being investigated, said Lt. Fred Corral of the Los Angeles County coroner's office. Nurmi was believed to be 85, although sources offer conflicting dates of birth.

Born Maila Syrjäniemi in Finland, Nurmi immigrated to the United States when she was a toddler. By 17, she had dropped her surname and taken on that of her famous uncle Paavo Nurmi, a world-class runner known as the "Flying Finn." In her teens, she moved to New York, and then Los Angeles, to pursue a career in acting.

Little came of Nurmi's efforts to land conventional leading roles in theater or on-screen. The unconventional came calling in 1953, after Nurmi attended a Hollywood masquerade ball dressed as the ghoul of Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons.

"I bound my bosoms, so that I was flat-chested," Nurmi said, "and 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."

Nurmi's costume was judged the best at the ball, according to an article that was posted last week on vampirasattic.com, her website. Months later, a KABC-TV producer tracked her down and offered her work as hostess of a late-night horror show.

In creating Vampira, Nurmi said she went beyond the Addams cartoon, developing an alter ego influenced by beatnik culture and her experiences as a child of the Depression.

Vampira wore a low-cut tattered black dress that showed off her impossibly small waist (courtesy of a waist cincher) and displayed more cleavage than was common for the day. With her 6-inch-long nails and dark, dramatically arched eyebrows, watching Vampira was "a release for people."

"The times . . . were so conservative and so constrained," Nurmi said in a video interview that was posted on her website. "There was so much repression, and people needed to identify with something explosive, something outlandish and truthful."

...But in 1955, KABC canceled her show, and the result was a stinging decline. When she met Wood at a party during the height of her career, she felt nothing but disdain, she told People magazine, but when he approached her in 1956 and offered her $200 to appear in his movie, she accepted the offer.

"I was scraping by on $13 a week," she said in the People article. "I thought, 'Well, here I go. I'm going to commit professional suicide right now.' "

"Plan 9 From Outer Space," a zombie movie, has been called the worst movie ever. She appeared in a few more movies, but by the 1960s, Nurmi's career had taken a turn toward oblivion.

...Nurmi opened a Vampira antique shop, but she continued to struggle to make ends meet. In the late 1980s, Nurmi filed a lawsuit against another glamorous ghoul. She alleged that Elvira had ripped off her character, copying features such as a "distinctive, low-cut, tattered black dress, emphasizing cleavage and a voluptuous figure."

The courts disagreed.

Nurmi's influence can be seen in the teen "goth" look of today, said Dana Gould, a longtime friend of Nurmi.

"She really sort of cast the mold for a look that is still around," said the comedy writer and comedian.

Director Tim Burton's film about Wood, starring Johnny Depp, introduced a new audience to Wood and Nurmi.