Juliet Prowse, who parlayed skillful dancing, sultry good looks and the best legs since Betty Grable into stardom in '60s movies and TV specials, died Saturday. She was 59 and had suffered from pancreatic cancer.
She died at 3:30 a.m. at home in Holmby Hills, spokeswoman Marcia N. Groff said.The unlikely combination of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Nikita Khrushchev made the former South African ballerina famous within months of her arrival in the United States in her early 20s.
Producer Hal Wallis predicted the tall redhead would be "buying Rolls-Royces before long . . . a big star."
While her film career didn't soar as long or high as many predicted, she had lasting success in television specials, stage musicals and nightclubs, often commanding thousands of dollars a week.
In 1965-66, she starred in a sitcom, "Mona McCluskey," about a movie star married to an Air Force sergeant. She was philosophical about its cancellation after just one season.
"Things generally happen for the best," she told The Associated Press shortly afterward. "I never worry about what happens in my career, because I can always do something else."
She was in the news even before her first major Hollywood movie came out, the 1960 musical "Can Can," starring Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine.
When filming was under way in the fall of 1959, Soviet leader Khrushchev was visiting the United States. He was a guest on the set, and the dancers performed the cancan for him.
The next day, Khrushchev roundly denounced the dance as immoral, and the then-unknown Prowse's picture was seen in newspapers around the world.
"I thought he was enjoying the dance," Prowse said later. "He was very kind through his interpreter to me afterwards. I did notice that his wife said nothing."
For a while, she juggled romances with Sinatra and Presley, star of her second film, "G.I. Blues." (Explaining her dates with Presley, she said, "Frank and I are mature people. We don't go for this teenage bit about going steady and all that jazz.")
She later became engaged to Sinatra, but broke it off after six weeks in early 1962 - generating another blizzard of publicity.
Born in India and raised in South Africa, Prowse trained as a ballerina, dancing with Johannesburg's Festival Ballet when she was just 14. What scuttled her ballet career was her height - 5 feet 8 inches.
"When I got on my toes, some of those male partners were way down there," she joked.