Yvette Mimieux, the blond and blue-eyed 1960s film star of “Where the Boys Are,” “The Time Machine” and “Light in the Piazza,” has died. She was 80.
Michelle Bega, a family spokeswoman, said Mimieux died in her sleep of natural causes overnight Monday evening at her home in Los Angeles.
In 1960’s “The Time Machine,” based on H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel, Mimieux starred opposite Rod Taylor as Weena, a member of the peaceful, blond-haired Eloi people in the year 800,000, who don’t realize they’re being bred as food by the underground Morlocks.
That role and others that soon followed made Mimieux one of the ‘60s most radiant starlets. The same year, she also starred in the MGM teen movie “Where the Boys Are” as one of four college students on spring break in Florida. Her character, distraught after being sexual assaulted in a motel, walks despondently into traffic.
“I suppose I had a soulful quality,” she told the Washington Post in 1979. “I was often cast as a wounded person, the ‘sensitive’ role.”
Yvette Carmen Mimieux was born on Jan. 8, 1942, in Los Angeles to a French father and a Mexican mother. She was “discovered” at age 15 when publicist Jim Byron, as he told it, spotted her on bridle path from a helicopter while flying over the Hollywood Hills. She and a friend were riding on horseback; Byron landed in front of them and gave her his card. Mimieux began as a model before MGM signed her in 1959.
“The subtle approach is the thing,” Byron told The AP in 1961. “I think we’ve got another Garbo on our hands.”