Myrna Fahey

Who was Myrna Fahey?

Myrna Fahey was an American actress best known for her role as Maria Crespo in Walt Disney's Zorro and as Madeline Usher in the film version of Edgar Allan Poe's, The Fall of the House of Usher.

She appeared in episodes of thirty-seven television series from the 1950s into the 1970s, including Bonanza, Straightaway, The Time Tunnel, Maverick, Perry Mason, The Adventures of Superman, and Batman .

Fahey was born in Carmel, Maine, near Bangor in 1933, but grew up in Southwest Harbor near Bar Harbor, Maine, where she was a cheerleader at Pemetic High School. She began competing in local beauty pageants in the early 1950s. She acted one season at the Pasadena Playhouse before breaking into TV, and became an avid skier in California. She invested in stocks and one of her contracts stipulated that she have a stock ticker in her dressing room. Besides Joe DiMaggio, she also dated George Hamilton. She died on May 6, 1973, at age 40 at St. Johns Hospital, Santa Monica, California, after a long battle with cancer. She is buried in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Bangor, Maine

Fahey complained in a 1960 interview that she was being typecast in 'good girl' roles because of what directors called her 'moral overtones', even though she wanted to play darker and more complicated characters. She had worked in many Westerns in the late 1950s, usually in the role of the sheriff's daughter, including an appearance on Gunsmoke in 1957. She also appeared in "Duel at Sundown", a particularly famous episode of Maverick with James Garner, featuring Clint Eastwood as a trigger-happy villain. Her image branched out in the 1960s, helped by House of Usher and a role on the Boris Karloff-hosted TV series Thriller that same year entitled 'Girl With A Secret'. Even her Western parts became "darker". After a rough love scene in Bonanza in which she cut her lip, the cast presented her with an award for 'Best Slapper in a Filmed Series'.