Yvette Vickers Dies Mysterious Death

People.com :    She caused guys at the drive-in movies of the ’50s and the readers of Playboy to swoon, counted Cary Grant and the actor Jim Hutton (father of Timothy Hutton) among her lovers, and even appeared – briefly – opposite Paul Newman in the Oscar-winning Hud. But when it came to Hollywood endings, pinup model and actress Yvette Vickers reached a heartbreaking fadeout.

As her uncollected mail gathered cobwebs outside, inside Vickers’s dilapidated Los Angeles home last Wednesday, police, acting on a concerned neighbor’s tip, discovered the mummified remains of the onetime 36″-24″-36″ cult star of the space-alien B-movies Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Attack of the Giant Leeches.

Vickers was 82, had long been a recluse – and could have been dead for as long as a year, reports the Los Angeles Times.

An autopsy has been ordered, though foul play is not suspected. If anything, her sad demise almost seems like something out of a movie in which Vickers once played a cameo, as a giggling girl in Billy Wilder’s acid-etched 1950 portrait of a glamorous movie life gone sour, Sunset Boulevard.

“She kept to herself, had friends and seemed like a very independent spirit,” her neighbor in Benedict Canyon, actress Susan Savage, told the Times. “To the end she still got cards and letters from all over the world requesting photos and still wanting to be her friend.”

Still, the Times also quotes Boyd Magers, editor and publisher of the movie publication Western Clippings, as saying the once “bright, intelligent” actress grew “paranoid” in her later years and was convinced she was being stalked.

“We’ve all been crying about this,” said Savage. “Nobody should be left alone like that.”