Sultry Elaine Stewart captured in a cheesecake pose from 1956. She was born Elsy Henrietta Maria Steinberg on May 31, 1930 in Montclair, New Jersey, the daughter of German immigrants. A one-time usherette and cashier at her hometown movie theatre, she was eventually taken on by the Conover Modeling Agency. Changing her name to the more glamorous-sounding Elaine Stewart, her beauty eventually caught the attention of Hollywood executives. Movie mogul Hal B. Wallis offered the wannabe starlet a small, unbilled role of a nurse in the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis comedy "Sailor Beware" (1952). Her build-up was gradual with window-dressing bits as a chorine, stewardess and the like in such MGM films as "Singin' in the Rain" (1952), "You for Me" (1952) and "Everything I Have Is Yours" (1952). She then moved up the movie ladder to more visible parts in "Sky Full of Moon" (1952) and, most pointedly, as Lila, the sexy opportunist who has a marvelous descending staircase bit in "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952). She also played a princess-in-peril in "The Adventures of Hajji Baba" (1954) and glamoured up the musical "Brigadoon" (1954). Elaine left MGM around 1956, and finished off the decade with the films "Night Passage" (1957), "The Tattered Dress" (1957) and "Escort West" (1959). In the early 1960s, she made a couple of films both here and abroad and her standard sultry allure could be witnessed on such TV dramas as "Burke's Law" (1963) and "Perry Mason" (1957). Briefly married to actor Bill Carter in the early 1960s, she later wed Emmy Award-winning game show creator Merrill Heatter and left her career to raise two children. In 1972, she became a co-hostess of the game show "Las Vegas Gambit" (1972) and later partnered in the dice-rolling gamer "High Rollers" (1975) with Alex Trebek. Following an extended illness, the actress died in Beverly Hills at the age of 81 in June of 2011.
Color enhanced image by Hollywood Pinups from the b&w original.
