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Inger Stevens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Inger Stevens (October 18, 1934 – April 30, 1970) was a Swedish-American movie and TV actress.
Stevens, born Inger Stensland, in Stockholm, Sweden, was an insecure and often ill child. Her parents divorced while living in Sweden and she moved with her father to the United States. She attended high school in Manhattan, Kansas. At 16 she left home and started to work in New York City as a showgirl in low-budget performances. At the same time she took lessons at the Actors Studio.
Later she made appearances in commercials, plays and TV until she finally got her big chance in the movie Man on Fire, with Bing Crosby. She was also romantically linked to Crosby.
Several roles in major films followed, but she had the greatest success with her leading role in the television series The Farmer's Daughter, and also with roles in TV episodes of series like Bonanza, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Twilight Zone. Ironically, in both of her Twilight Zone performances, she portrays protagonists who believe they are living women but discover they aren't alive after all: in one episode, she is an unwitting ghost; in the other, she is a robot programmed to believe she is human.
Miss Stevens, although attractive, seemingly pleasant and successful, was an unhappy woman. She committed suicide in Los Angeles, California with an overdose of barbiturates in 1970. It then became known that from 1961 to her death she had been married to Ike Jones, a black American actor. Her first husband was Anthony Soglio, with whom she was married from 1955 to 1957. It was rumored that she'd had less-than-satisfactory affairs with several Hollywood actors, including Anthony Quinn, throughout her career.
After The Farmer's Daughter was cancelled in 1966, Inger concentrated on making movies. The best known of her movie roles were the westerns Hang 'Em High with Clint Eastwood in 1968 and Five Card Stud with Dean Martin the same year. Inger made plans on making a comeback on TV in 1970 with the detective drama series The Most Deadly Game, but her suicide that year changed these plans.
She dated Burt Reynolds shortly before her suicide. To this day Reynolds politely refuses to discuss any aspect of his relationship with Stevens.