Barbara Steele

Here are two lounge songs to illustrate the beauty and charisma of movie icon Barbara Steele.

Barbara Steele (born in 1937) is an English film actress. She began as a model. She is best known for starring in Italian gothic horror films of the 1960s. Her breakthrough role came in Italian director Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960), now hailed as a classic. Steele starred in a string of horror films, including The horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962), The ghost directed by Riccardo Freda, and Roger Corman's 1961 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The pit and the pendulum, among others. In the 1970s, she played less but appeared in famous films such as Caged heat by Jonathan Demme (1974), Shivers by David Cronenberg (1976), Piranhas by Joe Dante (1978). She guested on various British television shows including the spy drama Danger man starring Patrick McGoohan. She took the role of Julia Hoffman in the 1991 revival of the 1960s TV series Dark shadows. In 2010, she was a guest star in the Dark shadows audio drama The night whispers.

In 2010, actor-writer Mark Gatiss interviewed Steele about her role in Black Sunday (1960) for his BBC documentary series A history of horror. Although she is considered as an icon of the horror genre, she said once to prefer the art-house cinema, and her roles in such films as Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963), Mario Monicelli's L'armata brancaleone (1966), Volker Schlöndorff's Der junge Törless (1966), or Louis Malle's La petite (1978). Her husband, a screenwriter, had written a role for her in Sydney Pollack's They shoot horses, don't they? (1969), but it was Susannah York who finally got the part.

Enjoy Barbara Steele's flaming beauty!