Katherine Victor 1923- By Barry Brown Katherine died on 22 October 2004 in Los Angeles, following a stroke.

There are few comparisons that offer explanation for the celebrity of Katherine Victor and, indeed, that celebrity was a cumulative affair, far from the more immediate impact made by the widely-distributed films of her predecessors, Evelyn Ankers, Gale Sondergaard and Allison Hayes. To begin with, five of the six fantasy pictures she starred or was featured in were given slim theatrical release; by 1970, however, four years after her last top role, repetitious television presentation of Victor's performances had made their mark. From relative obscurity, she eventually emerged as the last in a line of American female horror stars that had begun nearly forty years before with Fay Wray and sputtered to an ignominious close with the films of Jerry Warren and the actress who has been called Queen of the Zs.

Katherine Victor was born Katena Ktenavea (pronounced Kuh-ten-uh-vay-uh) on August 18, 1923 at 350 West 42nd Street in that section of New York City lovingly referred to as Hell's Kitchen. She was the younger of two daughters born to Greek immigrants Vlasios and Stamatia Ktenavea. In 1930, due in part to the stockmarket crash and to the ill health of her father and sister, the Ktenavea family moved to Los Angeles, where Katena grew up.

Her father, a lover of music and a frustrated violinist, led his two daughters to an early appreciation of that art. Katena began taking violin lessons at the age of four and while still a child found herself performing at various social functions. The young musician eventually became interested in the piano, however, much to her father's disapproval, and switched to that instrument after a few years' bullheaded rebellion. At age eleven, she began her studies at the Hollywood Conservatory.

Katena's dedication to the piano proved not to be a whim. She devoted herself to its mastery and, after graduating from Hollywood High, intended a career as a concert pianist. An example of the intensity of her devotion came during the last years of World War Two. Having developed without benefit of formal training a natural aptitude for drawing, Katena worked as a technical illustrator for wartime handbooks at Douglas Aircraft, a job that, once accepted, she was forbidden by government order to leave. Since this cut severely into her practice time at the piano, she made up a story concerning her doctor's 'orders' that she not overwork herself, thus maneuvering her working hours around her practice schedule. With such narrowing determination, it would seem that little stood between her and her goal but, in 1946, a classically minor mishap dramatically altered the course of her career and the substance of her life.

She had been preparing for a concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and wasn't too happy about it and so, even today, the fatalistic Katherine is not so sure it was an accident when she slammed a car door on her right index finger, smashing it so badly it took a full year before the fingerprint whorls returned. The broken finger wasn't repaired properly and when it did heal it had a tendency to lock. Katena took the misfortune severely and overdramatically. Instead of viewing the accident for what it was -- a major but by no means conclusive setback -- she sank into an apathetic, self-indulgent depression. "My whole world was absolutely shattered. My whole life just crumbled", she later said.

Finally, it was a friend who coaxed her out of lethargy, telling her she needed to view herself apart from music and counselling her to attend a modeling school. Incredibly, Katena had thought of herself as being an ugly girl and had had little social life to speak of. Even her clothing showed little concern for fashion. Modeling school taught her not only the more or less mechanical aspects of poise and deportment, it instilled in her a quality heretofore lacking -- an awareness of her beauty. In '47, rapidly regaining a self-respect that had suffered badly for a year, she embraced the glamor and unapologetic manner of the fashion model, beginning her professional work at garment showrooms and on live television. She entered beauty contests and even turned her artwork to use, designing clothing and jewelry. The ugly ducking had emerged.

As a pianist, Katena's favorite pieces had been Brahms' G Minor Rhapsody and  the melancholy first movement of Edward MacDowell's Piano Concerto in D Minor -- both appealed to her own darker feelings and hyperimagination. It was inevitable that these deeper creative urges would prove too strong for containment by such an artificial form as modeling. Acting was the next logical step.

In grade school, Katena had been a 'little ham': writing, producing, directing, making costumes for and/or acting in plays, but this attraction was soon eclipsed by her musical inclinations and she had no part of high school dramatics. Then, in 1948, a weird confluence of events resurrected that spurned, forgotten love.

Katena had had her astrological chart prepared and interpreted. When she went to hear the results, the astrologer informed her she possessed the finest chart for an actress the astrologer had ever seen. The day after this judgement was rendered, quite out of the blue, Katena received a call from a friend, Jack Hearn, a writer of historical articles, who asked her to play the title role in an amateur production of Sophocles' Antigone he intended to stage in Beverly Hills. At first, she thought he was joking, so he asked her merely to consider it. The ever-impressionable girl, sensitive to presentiments, omens and oracles, did consider and in the end decided that, in fact, her true destiny and the raison d'etre for her devastating accident of two years before, had been revealed to her. She accepted the part.

At the night of the first reading of the play, Katena was nervous and apprehensive. Later, she recalled: "We sat down and as soon as my cue came, I delivered my lines as if I had been doing it all my life. It was a wonderful feeling." And though the production, for various reasons, never got off the ground, it decided at least one young performer on the path her future would take.

Altering her name to Katena Vea, she embarked on a study program: voice placement and projection with Dr. David Hutton, the husband of evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson, and drama with actress Eugenie Leontovich. She landed her first professional job the very same year, doing two characters in an episode of the radio show Tarzan that starred then-actor, now director (You'll Like My Mother, The Last American Hero) Lamont Johnson as Burroughs' jungle hero.

For four years, the fledgling actress worked often on radio, in live tv shows like Mystery House and Lights, Camera, Action, helping to support herself on the side by teaching music at her own small school. Her best parts were in little theatre productions of such plays as Salome, The Fabulous Invalid, Wuthering Heights and the title role in Hedda Gabler, starring opposite veteran horror film character actor Michael Mark. One of her favorite roles of her entire career was that of Nina, the fallen woman with a touch of class in Alfred Hayes' play, The Girl on the Via Flaminia. One of her great disappointments was in narrowly losing the role in the movie version, Act of Love, to Barbara Laage.

By 1952, however, with television on the West coast attracting the more prestigious Eastern seaboard producers and entertainers, Katena began to feel the pinch of being shunted aside by New York talent and herself decided to return to the city of her birth where, hopefully, she could build a more impressive reputation. In January of 1953, she made the move, but not before she'd made her film debut in what was, prophetically, a low-budget horror picture.

The Mesa of Lost Women (also titled Lost Women of Zarpa) was filmed in 1952 and released the following year. It starred Jackie Coogan as a mad scientist who creates giant tarantulas and super-women and featured an actress named Tandra Quinn as 'The Tarantula Woman'. Katherine, in her small role, foreshadowed the character she was later to play to the hilt: the mysterious, dark-garbed villainess, beautiful, elegant and supremely menacing. Her bit is silent, appearing at the beginning of the picture. The footage was shot at Red Rock Canyon in Death Valley and shows an auto driving up to Coogan's abode. The car comes to a stop and Katherine emerges along with an innocent scientist whom she escorts into the building. For all intents and purposes, it was an inauspicious film debut, but time would prove it ironically fitting.

In New York, the first thing Katena Vea did was rent a piano and place it in her apartment. For the next four years, except for brief annual visits to her ailing mother in California, she worked in and out of New York, sowing the wild oats of an upstart actress. She landed her first job in the national road company of School for Brides, a farce by Frank Gill, Jr. and G. Carleton Brown, only three months after her arrival. Later, she did some runway fashion modeling, played in an off-Broadway production of Everyman at the Jan Hus Playhouse, toured New England and Canada as a torch singer in her own nightclub act, did bits in films like Sabrina (as a train passenger) and The Eddy Duchin Story (a society matron), played straightwoman to a comic in New Jersey and, at a particularly desperate time, even demonstrated the first Papermate pen in Macy's Basement.

It was while in the Big Apple, too, circa 1954, that Katena Vea became Katherine Victor when, one day, tired of explaning "Vea! V as in Victor" on interviews, she spouted out 'Katherine Victor' for the sake of expediency and from that time on assumed that name*.

*In the late sixties, at the suggestion of a numerologist friend, she changed the spelling of 'Katherine' to 'Kathrin'.

By 1955, she had managed to make Earl Wilson's column, but the actual career progress was all on the surface. Katherine looks back on her New York days with a sense of humor. While there she did anything that was available: a Broadway show might be in the offing, but the by time it was ready to be cast, she had accepted some less prestigious engagement. As she herself put it, with a smile: "You could say I'd separate the wheat from the chaff and take the chaff." A few years later, after her return to the West coast, she allowed an overzealous publicity agent to plant blurbs in various local and trade papers to the effect that, after a five year stay abroad, during which period she starred in Greek films, Katherine Victor had once again taken up residence in Hollywood.

That return took place in the summer of 1957. To support herself while in the process of resettlement, Katherine obtained a real estate salesmans' license and went to work for a broker. But in less than two months, she landed an acting job in a surprisingly casual way. It was to be years before she would come to realize the full significance of this assignment. To her, it was simply an opportunity to act that, hopefully, would lead to something else. It was also her first starring role in a film, even if the movie was a low-budget independent. Little did she know that the movie, Teenage Zombies, an unpretentious little horror drama, would be her first major step towards a firm position in fantasy film history.

Producer Jerry Warren, a former bit player in MGM films and later a producer of musical variety shows, had come on the film scene in 1956 with the release of Manbeast, an attempt to exploit the abominable snowman stories that were rife at the time. That picture made Warren quite a bit of money (in fact, of the fourteen films he eventually turned out, it was his biggest grosser) and he was encouraged to continue in the business. He had then completed a second shoestring film, The Incredible Petrified World, starring John Carradine and Robert Clarke, and was in the process of casting his third, Teenage Zombies.

The story concerns a group of teenagers on a waterskiing party who come upon an isolated island upon which lives a mysterious woman doctor who is conducting experiments on human victims, using a nerve gas that changes people into mindless slaves as part of a foreign-based plan to gain control of the United States. Aided not only by her zombie-like servant Ivan (played by Chuck Niles, better known as a jazz radio-station announcer in Los Angeles) and a crooked sheriff on the mainland, but a pet gorilla she keeps around for protection, the evil-minded wench manages to capture and properly menace a few of the teenagers until the others manage to get the upper hand and vanquish their captors through dubiously logical means after which they are rewarded with medals from the U.S. Army and a promise of an audience with the President, all in the space of seventy-three minutes.

Katherine got the role of the villainous Dr. Myra without even as much as a reading. Her old friend Jack Hearn once again was the fateful link. If years ago he had been largely responsible for launching her acting career, years later he initiated her meeting with the man who was to offer her the notoriety she had sought for years. Hearn's friend, J.L.D. Morrison, was backing the Warren film; besides appearing in the picture as one of the foreign agents whose government employs Dr. Myra, Morrison allowed Warren to shoot most of the film on his five-acre estate in Mandeville Canyon. When Hearn heard from Morrison that Warren had yet to cast his lead villainess, even though the film was scheduled to begin shooting in less than a week, he arranged for Katherine to meet the enterprising producer-director, who promptly cast her in the role. With little more than an introduction, and after nearly ten years of pursuing an acting career from California to New York, to be given the lead in a film, any film, was a shock to Katherine. She took it in stride, though, telling herself that, finally, her destiny was to be fulfilled. She discounted the fact that Warren had told her to costume herself in her own gowns, without asking to see them beforehand. He trusted her, she must have surmised. She discounted, too, the fact that filming was to begin in less than a week and there would be no prior rehearsals. When the actual filming began, she was a bit disturbed by the utter lack of direction (other than Warren's admonition to 'Keep it simple'), "but", she later said, "I thought at the time it would lead to other things."

Dr. Myra, as Katherine plays her, is one of those imperious, ice-palace bitches, the kind that movie publicity releases describe as 'beautiful but deadly'. 5'7", weighing 135, with deep, dark brown eyes, she walks and talks like a queen. When she isn't dressed in her white laboratory coat with its high-necked Mandarin collar, she flaunts her sex appeal in a sophisticated, form-fitting evening gown with two straps in front forming a seductive V at her neckline.

The film, completed in one week in October, 1957, lay on the shelf for nearly three years before Warren arranged its release. The world premiere, which Katherine was persuaded to attend, was held at the World Theatre in Hollywood in 1960. Katherine hadn't seen the picture before and though she may have had some idea she wouldn't care for it too much, she didn't quite expect it to be as bad as it was. "I cringed at the whole thing. I was very disappointed", she remarked. But the film was a box office success nearly everywhere it played and today is regarded as the best of Warren's output in terms of camp enjoyment.

By the time Teenage Zombies had reached the theatres, Katherine had another horror film in the can. The Cape Canaveral Monsters, made in 1959, went further towards establishing her as a screen villainess. It opens on a beach scene as two Cape Canaveral scientists (Jason Johnson and Katherine) finish a swim, then begin to return home in their car. But two small, bright pinpoints of light which have been following them cause the auto to crash, apparently killing its occupants. The two dots then enter the corpses of the dead earthings and proceed to use their bodies to sabotage the Earth's space program. Both are mutilated: Hauran (Johnson) has lost his arm; Nadja (Victor) has a horrible scar across her face. They take refuge in a cave, where they bring a young scientist (Scott Peters) and his girlfriend (played by Linda Connell, wife of the film's cinematographer, the late Merle Connell) whom they restrain through use of an invisible force-field. Peters eventually uses his watch to break through the field and manages to frustrate the aliens' efforts, whereupon they leave the bodies of the dead earthlings.

Katherine heard the part of Nadja was being cast from a friend, actor Billy M. Greene (1897-1973), who played Connell's scientist-father, Dr. Von Hoften, in the film. Phil Tucker, who had written the screenplay, was set to direct and producer Richard Greer had arranged for healthy financing through the investments of a group of doctors. Katherine read for and got the part.

"I had great hopes for that picture because everybody was so enthused", she remembered. Tucker was a serious director who knew what he wanted and didn't hesitate to fulfil his responsibilities. And, unlike Jerry Warren, he had no aversion to close-ups and dimensional camera shots (Warren stuck to flat masters, singles or two shots). The film was to be shot in color, with a two-week shooting schedule and enough money to enable several takes per shot if something went wrong.

The color was the first thing to go. Last minute budget cuts restricted Tucker to black and white. Then, as the filming days went by, the cost of necessary special effects (which were, in fact, better-than-average for this type of film) ate away at the money reserve and made it necessary to take shortcuts in the acting department. Scenes were shortened, changed or compromised. When the film was finally screened, it proved a disappointment for everyone involved and was never released theatrically. A full year went by before the actors received their salaries.

Besides these two films, between 1957 and 1965 Katherine worked extensively on television. Her best roles were on episodes of Day Court and Night Court, but she also guested on series such as The Legend of Billy the Kid, Shannon, Space Cadet, Manhunt, Police Station and Slattery's People and thrice played a nurse on Ben Casey. She worked so much, in fact, that she had to withdraw from her real estate job. In 1960, however, when during a slow season she suddenly found herself without funds, she had to find another steady job, albeit with a more flexible schedule. It was in that year that Katherine first entered the animation business as an assistant production co-ordinator, working first with Bob Clampett on the Beany and Cecil cartoon show, later with Dale Robertson on the full-length feature cartoon, The Man from Button Willow (1965). Beginning in 1963, she accepted a position with Hanna-Barbera where, with the exception of short stays with Kinney-Wolf, De-Patie-Freleng and Filmation, she remained until 1970. Throughout those years, Katherine was able to take two to three days or sometimes as much as a week, to work an occasional acting job.

Then, in 1965, five years after the disastrous premiere of Teenage Zombies, which Katherine would have preferred to forget, she received a call from none other than Jerry Warren.

By now, Warren was making a different sort of picture. He had not shot a full-length feature of his own since 1958 when he completed the jungle adventure Terror of the Bloodhunters with Robert Clarke and Warren regular Steve Conte. Of late, ol' Jerry had been involved in re-editing footage from foreign films, splicing in additional scenes with American actors which he wrote and directed himself, then providing narrative tracks in a usually unsuccessful effort to produce a hybrid picture that still made sense. Though he'd used stock footage to a lesser degree in most of his other epics, his reliance on the awkward and heavyhanded multiple-pictureweaving practice began with Invasion of the Animal People, a compilation of three separate films. A friend of Warren's, James Logan, had tried unsuccessfully to integrate scenes from a Swedish science-fiction film with scenes he himself had directed in Lapland with several American performers, starlet Barbara Wilson and the late character player Robert Burton. The experiment failed and he turned it over to the expeditious Jerry who, undaunted, shot a few additional snow scenes in the mountains of Big Bear, California and an introduction shot and narration with John Carradine, dusted off his own Terror of the Bloodhunters, and placed the two products on a highly remunerative double-bill. One may vilify Warren for his cynicism or love him for his chutzpah, but he could never be accused of underestimating the intelligence of the moviegoing public.

By the time Jerry had contacted Katherine, he had released two additional suspense films, The Violent and the Damned and No Time to Kill and was now involved in re-editing a batch of Spanish-language features. He wanted to know if she would be interested in acting in any of the short scenes he planned to splice into the English-dubbed or narrated foreign footage. Against her better judgement, Katherine accepted. "Why I did it? It was just the call of the firehorse, I guess. It was just wanting to do something. It was just wanting to work, no matter how awful (the project was)", she confessed.

And so came the second and final phase of her work with the notorious shoestring moviemaker. Almost back to back, Katherine appeared in Curse of the Stone Hand and Creature of the Walking Dead. Though both roles are secondary, two more contrasting performances have rarely been seen. In the former, she gives perhaps the worst performance of her movie career; in the latter, one of her best.

Curse of the Stone Hand is a mess, even by Warren standards. Footage from two Chilean films, interesting in itself, is cut together with poorly written expository scenes performed by several American performers (Carradine, Katherine, Lloyd Nelson and Peaches Clark) and the whole package held together by a narrator (Bruno VeSota). Katherine appears as part of the second story, which concerns two brothers, one good, one evil, and the destruction they bring upon themselves over their love for the same woman. Katherine played a tavern girl whose own sister has been compromised, then cast off by the evil sibling. Her first scene in the picture is embarrassing. In the Chilean footage, we see the black-cloaked rake walking in the street below. Suddenly, with no preparation for or understanding of who she is or where she came from, Warren cuts to a medium shot of Katherine standing at a window looking down, supposedly on the fellow, while tearfully and angrily shouting reprimands at him. The speech is hurried and emotionally unconvincing, the writing atrocious. Her calmer scenes occur with Carradine as she mulls over what she intends to do to revenge her sister's honor.

If there was one positive aspect to Katherine's experience with Curse of the Stone Hand, it was that it enabled her to meet and work with John Carradine. "I enjoyed working with him", she commented. "He always had humorous anecdotes. I remember asking him why was he doing this? He said 'The color of the money is the same'."

Creature of the Walking Dead , at least, made more sense and Katherine was back in her element. Dressed in black, she was again the woman with an air of mystery, a conductor of séances whose maid has disappeared. She enlists the aid of a police inspector (Bruno VeSota again) but that aid, of course, consists of overwritten scenes meant not only as explanation for the accompanying Mexican footage, but to add minutes to the running time of the film to qualify it for television sale should theatrical distribution not be palatable. The camera sits in one palce throughout the lengthy American splices that support the goings-on in the Mexican picture, a piece originally entitled La Marca del Muerto. It concerns a doctor who experiments with immortality and resurrects his evil ancestor in the process. In order to remain alive, the ancestor needs a steady supply of human blood, causing considerable difficulty in the affairs of his fellowmen. Eventually, the desperate monster brings about his own destruction.

After the completion of her work in these two masterpieces, Katherine again made a vow not to work for Warren again, but when the redoubtable tradesman threw his next pitch, it was a curve ball, and Victor's resolution became like ice on a hot stove.

In 1965, the television series Batman made its debut and within six months its resounding success had set up phenomenal commercial vibrations throughout the country. 'Batmania', as it was termed, was a merchandiser's dream and Jerry Warren quickly scented the odor of green batwinged bills. Not one to waste time on lengthy preparation, he dashed off his own script, The Wild World of Batwoman, in considerably less time than it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace. The plot, such as it was, revolved around an absurdly costumed character named Batwoman, who supports a bevy of 'Batgirls' at her upper middle-class abode in southern California. These Batgirls are vaguely dedicated to insuring that an undefined good will conquer over 'evil'. A villain named Ratfink desires to obtain an atomic hearing aid that has recently been developed which he intends to restructure into an atomic bomb through the talents of his German scientist, Dr. Neon, who has a hunchbacked assistant named Heathcliff. In order to force Batwoman to steal the device for him, Ratfink has one of the Batgirls kidnapped and Batwoman's subsequent efforst to free her disciple and overthrow Ratfink brings, as the pressbook states, "wild antics from all."

Warren offered Katherine the top role of Batwoman. Explaining her acceptance of the offer in a July, 1975 interview, she said: "This was absolutely going to be top grade, color! (Jerry told me). I was going to have my props made, my Batmobile, my Boatmobile, everything was going to be top-dollar. Of course, I was flattered, naturally…..so you always think it's going to be different, (but then) I saw it was going to be just the same old thing."

The first thing to go, of course, was the color. Actually, the black and white almost goes too, the lighting being so dim in most parts of the overlong (seventy minutes) rambling film that one is overcome by a terrible sense of gloom watching this rarest and most decadent of Warren's output. The picture is played for laughs, which eschews the charm of Warren's earlier efforts to the extent that nearly all camp-value is eliminated. Both Lloyd Nelson as Heathcliff and George Andre (pseudonym for G.J. 'George' Mitchell) as Dr. Neon are allowed to violently overact, which only contributes to the dishevelment of the classic Warren mastershot. While some actors stand inert on one side of the screen, Andrew and Nelson fidget maddeningly on the other. The result is enervating chaos. Former B-film leading man Steve Brodie valiantly, but pitifully, tries to make the best of his surroundings, which include a group of singularly unattractive women as the Batgirls. Katherine walks thrugh her role, barely disguising her contempt towards the whole mess, garbed in high-top boots, black pantyhose, black bodice with a long cloak draped about her shoulders and a feathered hat. She sports a large fake diamond ring on her left hand and a small bat is drawn above her ample cleavage. Throughout the dire proceedings she wisely wears a mask, which she never removes. Understandably, it remains her least favorite film.

Still, the picture stood to make money. Warren planned to double-bill it with Creature of the Walking Dead, had had the press kits made up and was arranging for distribution when, in early 1966, the producers of the Batman tv show and the publishers at National Periodic Publications got an injunction against Warren to stop distribution. Warren's negative of the film was illegally seized and a long series of court battles ensued in which Warren ultimately 'won out'. His was a Pyrrhic victory, however. The monopolists used the courts no differently than they would had they owned them, using the strategy of perennial delay conceived by expertly amoral lawyers to give the lie to Ayn Rand's paeans to the 'morality of capitalism'. After four years of legal bloodsucking, the 'Batcraze' was over, Warren's picture worth less than the film it was printed on, and he much the poorer for the experience. In a desperate attempt to salvage something from the waste, he gave the film a new title, She Was A Hippy Vampire, and shot a new scene tacked on as a prologue that sought to justify the use of the word 'vampire' in the title.*

*The scene consists of two girls initiating a third into the Batgirl Club by handing her a potion which the girl is led to believe is blood. When she tastes and finds it to be strawberry yogurt, the other girls laugh and explain to her that 'vampires don't drink blood anymore.'

She Was A Hippy Vampire was co-billed with a picture called Blood of the Man Devil and released to spotty situations in 1970, but to no avail. The Batcraze was gone and the film, unsurprisingly, could not stand on its own merits. It was the only one of Warren's films to lose money and, literally, it drove him out of the business. Ironically, in the process, he suffered the same callous treatment from his fellow merchants with which he'd been wont to treat his audiences. Years later, the pain of his disillusionment was somewhat mitigated when he learned of the camp popularity of his work and the resurgence of interest in trashy horror pictures such as The Giant Spider Invasion*, but the good old school of hard knocks made a deep spirtual impression.

*One of the top fifty highest-grossing pictures in the United States in 1975, The Giant Spider Invasion, made on a reputed budget of under $100,000 dollars, had made $2,100,000. by December of that year. A further irony is that its leading man, as in Hippy Vampire, was Steve Brodie.

Technically, Warren's final film was the splice job he did on an uncompleted American-made horror film that had had the shooting title Night of the Beast. Directed by the late Harold Daniels, it starred John Carradine as a black-magic practitioner and Lon Chaney, Jr. as his rival, Belial. Warren added a few scenes, casting Katherine as the high priestess of a cult of devil-worshippers, then released it under the title Blood of the Man Devil, later selling it to television whee it is screened infrequently as House of the Black Death. Warren receives no credit on the titles.

With the Warren years behind her, Katherine's career cooled. She continued to appear in occasional television and film roles until 1970, when she more or less withdrew from acting after giving a final farewell performance in a fantasy short, Captain Mom, that still tours the college circuit.

Captain Mom was the work of two Filmation writers, Charles Menville and Len Janson, who had met Katherine when she briefly worked for that company. They remembered her performance in Teenage Zombies and asked her to play the domineering girl who tames Captain Mom (Menville), a superhero who is lonely and out of sync with society. He meets Katherine through a computer-dating service, falls in love, breaks up, considers suicide but can't bring himself to do it and ends by marrying the girl and flying off with a string of cans tied to his ankle and Katherine, with her knowing, self-satisfied Dr. Myra smile, riding astride the conquered hero's back. Strangely enough, this last film of hers is only fifteen minutes long, but had a longer shooting schedule than any one of Jerry Warren's pictures. And it was in color.

On April 19, 1970, Katherine married a retired consultant (he prefers his name not be used) whom she had met two years before and retired to Sherman Oaks, a suburb some ten miles removed from Hollywood. With her acting years behind her and much leisure time on her hands Katherine, with the encouragement of her husband, decided to resume her long-neglected study of music. She auditioned for and was accepted by the distinguished instructor Sergei Tarnowsky, former head of the piano department at Kiev Conservatory, whose students had included Vladimir Horowitz. He told her what someone should have told her thirty years ago -- that every pianist has had a broken finger. One must disregard it and not favor it. "Which is what I have done", says Katherine with a laugh, "and it's behaved itself beautifully." She remained under Tarnowsky's tutelage until shortly before his death in March 1976.

Thus, in a sense, Katherine had come full circle in one of the more eccentric screen careers on record. By the time this writer contacted her, she had put her movie work out of her mind and evinced something little less than shock when informed she was regarded as something of a star in the horror field. “This is absolutely incredible to me”, she declared. “It really is incredible because, as I said, I always wanted to have fans and to be in the movies, but to have it come out of such a poor list of credits…It’s incredible to me that, shall we say, my dreams as an actress for fans and admiration would come about so indirectly through productions that, being given the chance again, I certainly would not have done.”

The story of the neglected actor or director unaware of how often he is referred to and his work enjoyed and appreciated is a common one. Sometimes, as was the case with Busby Berkeley, they live to be restored to an eminence of sorts; others, like Bela Lugosi, die sadly when that redemption is but a few years away. Katherine, happily, could have gone about her business quite well without ever knowing that, in fact, she had become what she had striven so long to be, but Fate decreed otherwise. If nothing else, the knowledge that she had not, by a long shot, gone unnoticed during those years by the children who thrilled to her nefarious screen-deeds, was joyfully received.

As the characteristically self-effacing Queen of the Zs herself summed it up: “This makes me, really, not be so ashamed of what I have done.”

THE FILMS OF KATHERINE VICTOR

1953 Mesa of Lost Women (Howco)

1954 It Should Happen to You (Columbia)

1954 Sabrina (Paramount)

1956 The Solid Gold Cadillac (Columbia)

1956 The Eddy Duchin Story (Columbia)

1960 Teenage Zombies (Governor)

1960 The Cape Canaveral Monsters (CCM)

1965 Curse of the Stone Hand (ADP)

1966 Creature of the Walking Dead (ADP)

1970 Justine (20th Fox)

1970 She Was a Hippy Vampire (ADP)

1970 Blood of the Man Devil (ADP)

1970 Captain Mom (Creative Film Society; short)