Court in the Act

 

Knowing I have an interest in such things, people sometimes offer me their old knitting patterns before they end up at the charity shop, or the local recycling centre. Occasionally a gen turns up, and such was the case with this Woman's Weekly Chunky Wool Designs For All booklet from what looks like the late 1940s or early 1950s.



The fabulous skinny-rib sweater designs were the first things to catch me eye, but then I noticed the strikingly attractive model on page 5 wearing a V-neck cardigan. This was none other than Hazel Court, the Birmingham-born actress who gained lasting cult fame in horror films such as Hammers The Curse of Frankenstein and Quatermass and the Pit, and Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death.



Court moved to Hollywood in the mid-1960s and turned up in various TV shows before returning from acting in the mid-1970s. But before her years as a horror-movie star, Miss Court, rather in the manner of a female Roger Moore, supplemented her acting income with a career as a model, brightening up many a knitting catalogue.






Here she is in another Woman's Weekly pattern brochure modelling a cobwebby scarf.








And here as Elizabeth dining with Peter Cushing's Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

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