Stella Stevens, a Hollywood star of the 1960s and ’70s known for her voluptuous figure and graceful comic touch in such films as “The Nutty Professor” with Jerry Lewis and the cruise-ship disaster story “The Poseidon Adventure,” died Feb. 17 at a nursing home in Los Angeles. She was 84.
Ms. Stevens was a divorced teenage mother from Memphis when she drew the attention of talent agents who urged her to try Hollywood. As she was groomed as a contract player by various studios, she was often compared to Marilyn Monroe and 1930s star Jean Harlow for her smoldering blond looks.
By her own admission, Ms. Stevens won roles more for her sex appeal than her acting ability. She made her debut in a 1959 musical, “Say One for Me,” featuring Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds — “I was so far away from the camera, you’d have thought I was a tourist” — before appearing the same year in a screen version of the comic-strip-based “Li’l Abner,” as the evocatively named, flame-haired secretary Appassionata Von Climax.
In 1960, she spiced up her résumé with a revealing pictorial in Playboy magazine — the first of three over the next eight years. “After that, I starred in every one of my movies,” she told the New York Times. “If you’ve got ten million people seeing you in a layout like that … and half of them remember the name Stella Stevens and buy tickets for your movie, well, you can’t buy that kind of publicity.”
In 1961, she appeared in one of many roles as a woman of compromised virtue in “Too Late Blues,” an atmospheric jazz film directed by John Cassavetes and shot in black-and-white. She played a would-be singer who turns to prostitution and won praise for her strong performance opposite Bobby Darin as a struggling musician.
It was considered one of Ms. Stevens’s best dramatic roles, but she preferred comedy and did not enjoy Cassavetes’s improvisational directing style.
“ ‘What do I do in this scene, John?’ I ask him,” she told syndicated columnist Joe Hyams in 1961. “ ‘Do whatever you feel like doing,’ he answers. It’s so frustrating. I don’t know what to do, but I muddle around and we play the scene, and then we play it again and again, and then suddenly he finds the truth he was searching for, and we go on.”
After a forgettable role in “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) with her fellow Memphian Elvis Presley, Ms. Stevens found a congenial showcase in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963), opposite Glenn Ford. In that film, she had the part of a beauty queen who ends up sitting in on drums at a jazz club and falling for Ford’s best friend, played by Jerry Van Dyke.
She gained wider attention in Jerry Lewis’s popular 1963 comedy “The Nutty Professor” as the love interest of Lewis’s nerdy Professor Kelp, who invents a potion that transforms him into the finger-snapping, piano-playing hipster Buddy Love, based on Dean Martin and Buddy Greco.
In one scene, in which Lewis (as Buddy Love) tries to impress Ms. Stevens’s character (named Stella Purdy) by singing “That Old Black Magic,” he says, “Well, honey, I always say, if you’re good and you know it, why waste time beating around the bush, true?”
“And I always say that to love yourself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,” Ms. Stevens’s character responds. “And after watching you, I know that you and you will be very happy together.”
Buddy Love: “Just a minute, sweetheart. I don’t recall dismissing you.”
Stella Purdy: “You rude, discourteous egomaniac!”
Buddy Love: “You’re crazy about me, right? And I can understand it.”
Ms. Stevens appeared with Martin in the 1966 spy-movie spoof “The Silencers” and again in a 1968 romantic farce “How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life).” The same year, she went against type in “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows,” playing a forward-thinking nun who accompanies a group of Catholic schoolgirls on a cross-country bus trip.
In 1970, Ms. Stevens co-starred with Jason Robards in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue,” a western directed by Sam Peckinpah. Once again playing a prostitute, Ms. Stevens showed a generous amount of skin but also a deft touch with dialogue and physical comedy, as she and Robards’s title character, a rough-edged prospector, develop a warm, if short-lived relationship.
“Stevens blossoms as quite a marvelous actress,” Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote. “There are few enough actresses who can be funny and feminine at the same time, but she is certainly one of them.”
In one of her final major roles, Ms. Stevens appeared in 1972’s “The Poseidon Adventure,” one of the first modern blockbuster disaster movies, about a cruise ship being capsized by a tidal wave on New Year’s Eve. She portrayed a smart-mouthed ex-hooker recently married to a gruff police officer, played by Ernest Borgnine.
“This is the first trip since we got married, you know,” Borgnine’s character notes of their cruise on the S.S. Poseidon, before disaster strikes.
“Yeah,” Ms. Stevens answers, “and why we didn’t fly I’ll never know.”
Estelle Caro Eggleston was born Oct. 1, 1938, in Yazoo City, Miss. (Some accounts claim she was born in the quaintly named Hot Coffee, Miss., but she said this was a tale dreamed up publicists.) She was 4 when her family moved to Memphis. Her father worked for a farm implement company and sold insurance; her mother was a nurse.
“All I did in Memphis was wait to grow up,” she once told an interviewer. “I didn’t like being a child.” At 16, she married Herman Stephens, another teenager who worked as an electrician. Their son was born in 1955, and they divorced a year later.
She modeled at a department store by day and completed high school at night before enrolling at what is now the University of Memphis. Joining the drama club, she had a starring role in a production of William Inge’s comedy “Bus Stop,” playing a third-rate nightclub singer who fascinates a cowboy.
Strong local reviews and a portfolio of glamorous photographs led her to Hollywood, where she changed the spelling of her married name and became Stella Stevens. She left her son with her parents, leading to a long custody battle with her ex-husband. Each accused the other of kidnapping, and Ms. Stevens’s parents were briefly jailed before she won full custody.
In addition to her son, Andrew, who became an actor, director and producer, survivors include three grandchildren. Ms. Stevens never remarried, but she had a 40-year relationship with Bob Kulick, a rock guitarist and producer who died in 2020.
After being recognized as a leading sex symbol, Ms. Stevens became more of a character actress in the second half of her career, appearing in dozens of TV movies and series and making frequent appearances at fan festivals, often with other cast members of “The Poseidon Adventure.”
She had a regular role as a madam in “Flamingo Road,” a prime-time NBC soap opera that ran from 1980 to 1982.
“The truth of the matter is that I’ve been typecast,” she told United Press International in 1988, “but I don’t mind because hookers are among the few roles that require glamorous wardrobes, feathers, and jewelry. Not too many actresses can get all gussied up like that.”
