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If horror had a female face ... it probably would be Barbara Steele's [Barbara
Steele bio - click here]. That said, if you're into the more
campy side of genre cinema, into films in which Dracula
comes to the 20th century, men go to the center of the earth to find
scantily clad cavegirls, and women prove they can do everything Luke
Skywalker can but look way better, then you simply must have stumbled
upon Caroline Munro every now and again. The point is, while Barbara
Steele represents straight gothic horror from the 1960's - and has several
genre classics under her belt -, Caroline Munro stands for horror and
fantasy cinema of the 1970's, when in her homecountry Great Britain, established
horror producers started experimenting with their tried-and-true genre
formulas due to shrinking audience interest ... and came up with often
hilarious but sometimes quite sexy results. And Caroline Munro was perfect
for this type of film: She might not have been the best actress (though
capable enough to handly each and any of her roles), but she
had fashion-model good looks to her credit, her
face seemed innocent and sensuous all at once, her body looked great in
the skimpy outfits she was often made to wear (though she never showed
herself in the nude out of principle), her long legs looked great in mini
skirts, and her whole appearance definitely
spelled out 1970's in big letters - in other words, she was as much rooted
in the contemporary settings of the 1970's as Barbara Steele was caught up
in 1960's gothics.
Early Life, Early Career
Actually, Caroline Munro's acting initially was only a side-product of
her career as a model. Born 1950 in Windsor, England, UK, her photo was
entered in a Face of the Year-competition of the newspaper The
Evening News by her mother and a befriended photographer when she was
just 16, and sure enough, she won the competition. This led to several
modeling gigs, among others for Vogue magazine the following year,
and her natural good looks made sure that she became a hit with the
audiences and was able to make a living out of modelling not yet 20 years
of age. Also at age 16, she did the vocals on the single, Tar and
Cement. Musicians on the single included Eric Clapton, Steve Howe of Yes
and Ginger Baker of Cream - which might seem a bigger thing that it
actually was, as all these men were more or less at the beginning of their
careers ... With Caroline Munro first and foremost being a model
back then, her first movie assignments were of a merely
decorative nature, lending her pretty face (and body) to films including
the Alberto Sordi-comedy Fumo di Londra/Smoke over London
(1966, Alberto Sordi) - her debut - or the James
Bond-spoof Casino Royale (1967, Ken Hughes, John
Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Val Guest), but her roles
hardly ever ranked above extra-status. In the 1960's however, it was still her
modelling that granted her fame and visibility in the media, and she was
quite a big hit back then, too. Maybe her modelling career culminated in
1969, when she was hired as the poster girl for Lamb's Navy Rum, a
job that she held for no less than 10 years. She was also a much sought
after pin-up in those days.
From Model to
Moviestar With Caroline Munro's success as a model/pin-up and her
(however modest) on-camera experience, it was only a question of time
until she got her first real role in a motion picture, which happened in
1969, the film in question being A Talent for Loving (Richard
Quine), a Western comedy in which she played Richard Widmark's daughter.
Cesar Romero and Topol were also in the cast as well as Judd Hamilton. The
movie as a whole however was less than well received and is today largely
forgotten, and it is important for Munro's biography mainly for two
things, a) it was her acting debut, and b) she met Judd Hamilton on the
set of the film, whom she would marry in 1970 (and divorce in 1982), and
with whom she would make a few more films years later.
Considering
A Talent for Loving's lack of success, it is no wonder that Munro's
acting career didn't immediately take off. She had a small part later in
1969 in Where's Jack (James Clavell), a bio-pic about real life
18th century highway man Jack Sheppard (as played by former British
rockstar Tommy Steele), but soon it was back to (uncredited) decorative
roles for Caroline Munro, first and foremost The
Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971, Robert Fuest) and its sequel, Dr.
Phibes Rises Again (1972, Robert Fuest), with Vincent Price [Vincent
Price bio - click here] in the
title role and Munro playing his dead wife whom Price avenges in the first
film and tries to revive in the second. Since he doesn't succeed of course, the range of Caroline
Munro's role was extremely limited.
Though The
Abominable Dr. Phibes was pretty much an instant classic,
Caroline Munro's role in it was less than special (let alone demanding), but it was an
important initiation into the genre nevertheless, as before long, Michael
Carreras, head of Hammer,
spotted her on a Lamb's Navy Rum-billboard and wanted to hire her
pretty much on the spot (which he eventually did, too). Hammer
of course had been Great Briatin's leading horror production house in the
late 1950's and during the 1960's, but - like the British film industry in general - saw itself seriously
on the decline through 1970's - and sure enough, they could need a
fresh (and sexy) face to infuse new blood into their cinematic output ...
which has over the years grown a bit formulaic.
So Caroline
Munro became the first and only person to ever be put under a long-term contract by Hammer
(even though the contract eventually amounted to no more than 2 films),
and before you know it, she was cast in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972,
Alan Gibson), a pretty campy piece of genre cinema that attempts to bring Hammer's
regular characters Dracula
and Van
Helsing - as played by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing
respectably - to
modern times ... with the predictably corny results. Still, maybe because of
its camp factor, Dracula A.D. 1972 has over the years become a cult
favourite. Munro by the way has the honour of becoming the first victim of
Christopher Lee's Dracula
in the film, playing an innocent hippie girl participating in a black
mass out of pure curiosity ...
Caroline Munro's next (and final) Hammer-film followed in
1974, Captain
Kronos, Vampire Hunter (Brian Clemens), yet another attempt to
breathe new life into the studio's vampire flick formula, this time by
blending genre mainstays with elements of the swashbuckler movie, thus
puting the film's emphasis omre on action than horror. Horst Janson plays the lead in the film,
with Caroline Munro, in her first bigger role, starring as his love interest. Initially, Captain
Kronos, Vampire Hunter was to be the first of a whole series of
films, but when it was met with little appreciation at the box office, the
series was cancelled - not Caroline Munro's fault though, who looks her
most sensual in this one, and one also can't deny that the film is very
stylishly directed - yet Horst Janson makes a rather bland hero, and the
lack of a lead villain also doesn't help things along too much. Over the
years, Captain
Kronos, Vampire Hunter has become a cult classic nevertheless
though, and it remains one of Munro's personal favourites. Hammer
did have a few other projects on the shelves for Caroline Munro, the most
notable is perhaps an adaptation of the Vampirella-comicbook
- but after a few test shots, Munro turned the role down because it would
have required nudity, and lots of it, and undressing in front of the
camera was something that she just wouldn't do. For the same reason she
reportedly also turned down other Hammer-films as well,
films that did get made with other actresses like Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde
(1971, Roy Ward Baker) and Frankenstein
and the Monster from Hell (1973, Terence Fisher). Caroline
Munro even turned down an
offer from Playboy to appear naked in the magazine - which she
turned down out of prinicple even though it would have meant lots of money
... what a shame, I might add. (By the way. Caroline Munro allegedly
also turned down roles in Force 10 from Navarone [1978, Guy
Hamilton] and The World is Full of Married Men [1979, Robert Young]
because they involved nudity.)
By the mid-1970's, Hammer
had pretty much run out of steam, and after Captain
Kronos, Vampire Hunter, the company would only produce a handful
films more and cease production after two half-hearted attempts at
television altogether. This of course meant the company soon enough had no
more use for Caroline Munro - but that said, she must have left quite an
impression on Captain
Kronos-director Brian Clemens, who insisted on giving her the
female lead in The Golden
Voyage of Sinbad (1974, Gordon Hessler), a film Clemens scripted from a
story by effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. In the film, Munro plays a
slavegirl who gets to wear a variety of skimpy outfits and who becomes the
love interest of titular hero John Phillip Law, while Tom Baker handles
the lead villain role [Tom Baker bio
- click here]. Yet the whole cast of course took backseat to Ray
Harryhausen's stop-motion creatures, the raison d'être of the film -
which is not the worst raison d'être, come to think of it.
With
1975's I Don't Want
to be Born/The
Monster, directed by former TV- and Hammer-director
Peter Sasdy, Caroline Munro returned to the horror genre, playing the best
friend of leading lady Joan Collins and an exotic dancer - which gives
Munro plenty of opportunity to appear in very sexy and brief outfits.
However, despite its rather stellar cast - Collins, Ralph Bates, Donald
Pleasence [Donald Pleasence
bio - click here] and John Steiner - the film, an uneven and very
British rip-off of It's
Alive (1974, Larry Cohen [Larry
Cohen bio - click here]) with traces of The
Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) and Roman
Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), is less than special and
looks a little old-fashioned even for the year of its release.
The
same of course goes double for At
the Earth's Core (1976, Kevin Connor), a cheaply made adaptation
of the Edgar Rice Burroughs-novel produced by Amicus
and starring (besides Munro) Doug McClure and Peter Cushing. The main
problem of the film that is a retro-sci-fi tale about a scientist
(Cushing) and his adventurer-student (McClure) going to the earth's core
in a giant drilling machine is that a movie of this sort does need a sizeable budget for special
effects ... which Amicus
simply didn't provide, so everything in At
the Earth's Core looks rather corny, not at all helped by Kevin
Connor's old-fashioned direction and Doug McClure's bland lead
performance. In contrast, Caroline Munro actually comes off pretty well, as
a cavegirl she once again looks great in skimpy outfits, and she certainly
helps considerably in saving this film from being a total loss - though
even with her help, the movie's little more than campy fun ...
From Bond-Girl to Scream Queen
As sexy as Caroline Munro might have looked in At
the Earth's Core, and as dear to the heart it is to some fans, the
film can hardly be considered a highlight in her career, and with the
British film industry in general on the decline in the 1970's, Munro did
some television work next, starring in an episode of the comedy series The
Howerd Confessions (1976) starring Frankie Howerd next as well as
the episode The Angels of Death (1977, Ernest Day) of The New
Avengers, which saw her in a catfight with Joanna Lumley - which
might be nothing special but at least it's fun viewing.
When
Caroline Munro's acting career already seemed to go nowhere in particular though, she
landed a role in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, Lewis Gilbert), one of
the better James
Bond-films of the Roger Moore-era. She didn't play the lead Bond-girl/love
interest, mind you - this spot was reserved for Barbara Bach -, but the
seductive right-hand woman of the film's baddie Curd Jürgens. Dressed
only in a bikini, she even manages to distract Roger Moore's Bond's
attention from lovely Barbara Bach, but ultimately he kills her in the
course of an exciting car-vs-helicopter-chase ... making her the first woman to ever directly been killed by Bond himself
within the
series. It is said that Caroline Munro turned down the role of
villainess Ursa (a role ultimately played by Sarah Douglas) in Superman
(1978, Richard Donner) to play in the James
Bond-film - which might have been good judgement, because her
role in The Spy Who Loved Me was very well received. (Interestingly
enough, both The Spy Who Loved Me and Superman were -
allegedly - at one time supposed to be directed by Guy Hamilton - just
like Force 10 from Navarone, which she - again allegedly - turned
down because of nudity issues.)
Unfortunately,
Caroline Munro was not able to ride the wave of her success in the James
Bond-film. Actually, it took her two years to make another
movie, and career-wise it was certainly a step down from The Spy Who Loved Me,
as her next film - even though it gave Munro her first real lead
role - on the surface looked like nothing more than an Italian
cheapie trying to cash in on the success of George Lucas' original Star
Wars (1977) ... Yet for many (me included), the film in question, Star
Crash (1979, Luigi Cozzi = Lewis Coates), qualifies as the best
film of her career, the one low budget Star Wars-rip off that was
actually able to blow the (vastly overrated) high budget original out of the water,
basically because it didn't take its cues directly from Star Wars itself but
borrowed from roughly the same films that Lucas was ripping off for his spectacle - special effects movies like Seventh Voyage of Sindbad
(1958, Nathan Juran) or
Jason and the Argonauts (1963, Don Chaffey), of course Barbarella
(1968, Roger Vadim), serials like Phantom
Empire (1935, Otto Brower, B.Reeves Eason) or Flash Gordon-serials,
and of course TV's Doctor
Who. And while Lucas' directorial clumsiness and lack of
imagination was ironed out by a way too big budget and an onslaught of
soulless special effects, Cozzi, who had in the past (not necessarily in
the future though) proven himself to be a highly versatile director (again
much unlike Lucas), showed how much one can make out of an admittedly low
budget and a silly story with the right amount of imagination, chutzpah, understanding of
the genre and of course self-irony (something else sadly missing from Star
Wars). Plus, Caroline Munro, seen in several Barbarella-like
outfits throughout the film, is certainly a lot sexier than Carrie Fisher
and more charismatic a lead than Mark Hamill, and Star
Crash's feminist message is also a welcome change to the
conservative patriarchal universe of the George Lucas-film. Star
Crash did reasonably well at the box office, especially when
considering its low budget, and scantily-clad Caroline Munro was at least
partly the cause of that, and there were serious talks
about making a sequel to the film, talks that lasted for quite some years,
but that ultimately came to naught as in the late 1970's/early 80's,
cinemas were literally flooded with cheap Star Wars-clones, and it
was at best doubtful that a second Star
Crash-movie could replicate the success of the first one (though
Bitto Albertini's totally unrelated piece of space erotica Giochi
Erotici nella 3a Galaxia from 1981 was internationally sold as Star
Crash 2 and even featured some effects lifted from Cozzi's movie). Apart
from Caroline Munro, Star
Crash also stars former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner as her
male companion, Christopher Plummer as the emperor of the universe, and
pre-TV-star David Hasselhoff as the emperor's rather useless son who
ultimately has to be saved by Caroline Munro's character Stella Star. Yet the
co-stars most important for Munro's future career are her own
husband Judd Hamilton, playing a robot, and Joe Spinell, playing the
baddie of the piece.
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The following year, Munro would reunite
with the two men under William Lustig's direction for Maniac
(1980), one of the most disturbing and relentless films of the first
slasher-era (this being the late 1970's and early 80's). The film was
executive produced by Hamilton - who doesn't appear onscreen in this one -
and Joe Spinell, who also plays the lead, a notorious woman-hating serial
killer, and the whole film actually belongs to him, as his performance is
disquieting to the hilt and strongly disturbing, even more disturbing than
all the in-your-face gore-effects that hit exactly the right note with
contemporary audiences. Caroline Munro plays the one woman with whom
Spinell's character is able to start a normal relationship, and when his
urges to kill her finally do come through, she is also the only woman able
to put up a fight and escape him ... Fans who saw Caroline Munro mainly
as a glamour model and star of (relatively) high-profile British films were
less than pleased to see her in a cheap American genre film, but due to
its relentlessness, Maniac
has become an instant cult classic with genre fans, and is today probably
the film she's best remembered for ...
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Riding on the crest of
the wave of Maniac's
success, Hamilton (this time acting as co-writer, co-producer and
co-star), Spinell and Munro (as lead actors) re-united once again in 1982
to make another slasher movie, the Cannes-set Fanatic/The
Last Horror Film (David Winters), in which Spinell gives another
disturbing performance as a star-stalking momma's boy - but this time he
turns out to be the hero in the end. Munro plays the object of Spinell's
desire, an attractive horror star, but unfortunately her role is seriously
undermined by an impossible partly bleached hairdo that I don't believe
was thought to be attractive even in the eighties. Fanatic
was never able to rival Maniac,
either in terms of intensity nor in terms of success, and thus it was the
last film of the trio Munro-Spinell-Hamilton. Munro divorced Hamilton in
later 1982 but continued her career pretty much unphazed, while Spinell
could be seen in many supporting roles in bigger and smaller Hollywood
productions after that, while always dreaming of eventually making
a sequel to Maniac, his
biggest success and personally most satisfying film - a hope that was cut
short by his death in 1989. In a twist of bitter irony, he had just
finished shooting a promo-reel for his proposed Maniac-sequel. Based
on her success in Maniac,
the roles Caroline Munro got offered during the 1980's were predominantly
in slasher movies, but pretty much from all over the world:
- Don't Open 'til Christmas (1984) is a British production
co-produced by Dick Randall and directed by veteran actor Edmund
Purdom (who also plays the lead), and is your typical seasonal
slasher. Of all things, Caroline Munro (who has a bit of a background
in music) was asked to perform a disco tune for this one.
- Dick Randall also co-produced the British-American flick Slaughter
High (1986, George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, Peter Mackenzie Litten),
and it's pretty much as good (or as bad?) as its title.
- El Aullido del Diablo/Howl of the Devil (1987, Paul
Naschy) took Caroline Munro to Spain to appear in director/wirter/star
Paul Naschy's self-referential and self-ironic horror flick [Paul
Naschy bio - click here] - a film that sadly enough
though never got much exposure anywhere in the world.
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- The Spanish-French co-production Faceless
(1988) was what could have been a highlight in director Jess Franco's
career, as he had quite a stellar cast on his hand - besides Caroline Munro
there's Helmut Berger, Christopher Mitchum,
Brigitte Lahaie, Stéphane Audran, Telly Savalas, Howard Vernon, Anton Diffring and of
course Lina Romay ... but unfortunately, the name-cast
also meant loss of freedom for the eccentric cult director and thus Faceless
turned into one of his least remarkable films, merely another retake
on his own Gritos
en la Noche/The
Awful Dr.Orlof (1962). Munro plays Telly Savalas' daughter,
but spends most of her screentime locked away in some dungeon until
she's saved by hero Mitchum.
- In 1991, Caroline Munro re-teamed with Luigi Cozzi of Star
Crash-fame for Il Gatto Nero/The Black Cat, a film
only allegedly based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe and at one time
intended to be the third part of Dario Argento's Three
Mothers-cycle (with Argento-collaborator Daria Nicolodi
even having helped with the film's script). Yet where Star
Crash was a tongue-in-cheek camp masterpiece and Argento's initial
Three
Mothers-films genre classics, The Black Cat is
nothing of the sort, just an attempt to churn out a horror film on a
budget hardly high enough to pay for sets and costumes let alone
special effects - and this shows on film clearly enough.
- In a departure from her horror films, Caroline Munro also appeared in
the TV-movie Maigret (1988, Paul Lynch) in the late 1980's, a
murder mystery starring Richard Harris as Georges Simenon's French
detective.
As low-profile as many of these productions sound (and in some cases
are, actually), during the 1980's, Caroline Munro was also in talks for a
few high-profile projects that never came into being, like a feature film
based on the television series Doctor
Who, in which she would have played the companion to David
Bowie's title character (at least that's what was rumoured), and the lead
in Cutthroat Island, a film that was eventually made in 1995 by
Renny Harlin starring Geena Davis.
Also, from 1984 to 1987, Caroline Munro hosted the popular gameshow 3-2-1
on Yorkshire Television, appeared in a couple of music videos by
Meat Loaf and Adam And, and she tried to break into the music business in
1984 with the Gary Numan-produced Pump Me Up - a dance single that
hardly sold at all, though. Music always remained one of Caroline Munro's
passions though, as in more recent years, she recorded several songs with
Gary Wilson under the name Wilson Munro.
Fade-out ... Not Quite
In 1990, Caroline Munro got remarried, this time to George
Dugdale, one of the co-directors of Slaughter
High (and co-director with Peter Mackenzie Litten of the
criminally underrated Living
Doll [1990]), and the couple soon had two children.
Caroline Munro
decided to take a break from acting to concentrate on her kids and family, to return to the screen only on the
rarest of occasions, like Jeffrey Arsenault's low buget vampire flick Night
Owl (1993) also starring John Leguizamo and former Andy Warhol-starlet
Holly Woodlawn, or Peter Mackenzie Litten's Aids-drama To Die
For (1994).
Over the years though, Caroline Munro's
popularity within fan circles hardly at all faded, so with her children
having grown older, she now and again returned to acting in the 2000's -
and wouldn't you know it, she did finally get a part on Doctor
Who, even if not on the big (or even the small) screen but on
an Big Finish-audiobook, Omega, with Peter Davison (who played the
character on TV in the early 1980's) in the lead.
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Apart from that, Caroline Munro could also be seen playing supporting roles in
the films Flesh
for the Beast (2003, Terry M.West) - a piece of horror erotica in
which she shares a scene with fan-fave Aldo Sambrell -, Domestic
Strangers (2005, Jeffrey Arsenault), and The Absence of Light
(2006, Patrick Desmond) - a film with a stellar B-supporting cast
including Tom Savini, David Hess and Tony Todd. All of these are
American independent movies that above all else prove one thing of course:
That Caroline Munro has left her mark on genre filmmaking, that there
still is an international fanbase for her, and that though her youth may
have faded (she turned 50 in the year 2000), that doesn't mean that fans
are likely to ever forget her ...
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