About Stella Stevens
Stella Stevens (born Estelle Caro Eggleston; October 1, 1938 – February 17, 2023) was an American actress. She is the mother of actor Andrew Stevens.
Stevens began her acting career in 1959 in film Say One for Me and won the Golden Globe Award for "New Star of the Year". She appeared in three Playboy Pictorials and was named Playmate of the Month for January 1960.
She starred in films such as Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), The Nutty Professor (1963), and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and also appeared in several television series. Stevens also worked as film producer, director, and writer.
Born Estelle Caro Eggleston on October 1, 1938 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the only child of Thomas Ellett Eggleston, an insurance salesman, and his wife, Estelle (née Caro) Eggleston, a nurse who was sometimes called by the nickname "Dovey". One of the younger Estelle Eggleston's great-grandfathers was Henry Clay Tyler, an early settler from Boston and a jeweler who gave the Yazoo City courthouse cupola its clock.
When Stevens was four, her parents moved to Memphis, Tennessee. They lived on Carrington Road, near Highland Street, in the city. She attended St. Anne's Catholic School on Highland Street and Sacred Heart School on Jefferson Avenue, graduating from high school in 1955 at the Memphis Evening School at Memphis Tech High School.
At age 16, she married electrician Noble Herman Stephens, on December 3, 1954, in Holly Springs, Mississippi. They moved to Memphis, where their only child, Herman Andrew Stephens, was born on June 10, 1955. The couple divorced in 1957.
While studying at Memphis State University, Stevens became interested in acting and modeling. According to her official biography, "Her schooling in Memphis, included a couple of years at Memphis State University, where she was noticed in the school play, Bus Stop. The Memphis Press-Scimitar review of that performance in Memphis sparked her career."
Stevens was modelling and working for Goldsmith's department store in Memphis when she signed a contract with 20th Century-Fox in 1958, with Buddy Adler and Dick Powell considering her for a film based on the life of Jean Harlow. She made her film debut in Say One for Me (1959), a modest musical produced by and starring Bing Crosby, appearing in a minor role as a chorus girl. Stevens' contract with Fox was dropped after six months.
After playing Appassionata Von Climax in the musical Li'l Abner (1959), she signed a contract with Paramount Pictures (1959-1963). In 1960, she won the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actress for her performance in Say One for Me, sharing the distinction with fellow up-and-comers Tuesday Weld, Angie Dickinson, and Janet Munro.
In 1961, she starred opposite Bobby Darin in John Cassavetes' Too Late Blues, and in 1962, she starred opposite Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls!.
In 1963 she appeared in two successful comedy films: The Nutty Professor, starring comedian Jerry Lewis. She plays his student and love interest, Stella Purdy, and in Vincente Minnelli's The Courtship of Eddie's Father, the would-be "Miss Montana".
In 1964, she signed a four-year contract with Columbia Pictures. Following appearances in Synanon (1965) and The Secret of My Success (1965), Stevens starred as a sexy but clumsy government agent opposite Dean Martin in the Matt Helm spy spoof The Silencers (1966). Her last film for Columbia was Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968), in which she played a young nun, Sister George, "who understands and sympathizes with the rebellious students" at a girls' Catholic boarding school.
In 1970, Stevens starred opposite Jason Robards in Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue, for which she received excellent reviews. In his review in The New York Times, Roger Greenspun wrote, "But it is Stella Stevens, at last in a role good enough for her, who most wonderfully sustains and enlightens the action."
In 1972, she co-starred with Jim Brown in the blaxploitation movie, Slaughter. Later that year, in Irwin Allen's hugely successful disaster film The Poseidon Adventure, starring Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Roddy McDowall, and Shelley Winters, Stevens played Linda Rogo, the "refreshingly outspoken" ex-prostitute wife of Borgnine's character.
Although she continued to appear in feature films for the next four decades, Stevens shifted the focus of her career to television series, miniseries, and telemovies.
Stevens married Noble Herman Stephens in 1954, when she was 16. Their son Andrew was born in 1955. They divorced in 1957. Following her divorce she changed the spelling of her last name to 'Stevens' and left her son in the custody of her parents while she pursued an acting career. In the years following, she and her former husband engaged in a custody battle for their son, with each party accusing the other of kidnapping, before Stevens finally won full custody. His professional name is Andrew Stevens.
In late 1976, Stevens purchased a ranch in Methow Valley near Carlton, Washington on the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains. She also opened an art gallery and bakery in the nearby small town of Twisp, Washington.
In 1983, Stevens began a long-term relationship with rock guitarist Bob Kulick. A little over a year later, he moved into Stevens' Beverly Hills home. In March 2016, Kulick and Stevens sold her longtime Beverly Hills home, and she moved to a long-term Alzheimer's care facility in Los Angeles. Kulick often visited her there until his death on May 28, 2020.
Stevens died of complications from Alzheimer's disease at the age of 84 in Los Angeles on February 17, 2023.
R.I.P.
