She had roles in “Ten Thousand Bedrooms,” “She Gods of Shark Reef,” and “The Firebrand” on her résumé.
Lisa Montell, a starlet in the 1950s and 1960s who starred with Dean Martin and Rod Taylor in movies like Ten Thousand Bedrooms and World Without End, has passed away. She was 89 years old.
According to her daughter Shireen Janti, Montell passed away on March 7 from cardiac issues and infection at the Southern California Hospital in Van Nuys.
In her acting career, Polish-born Montell has played a range of ethnicities. She portrayed Hawaiians in the Roger Corman films Naked Paradise (1957) and She Gods of Shark Reef (1958), both of which were shot in Kauai.
The Gene Autry Show, Broken Arrow, Tales of Wells Fargo, Colt.45, Have Gun, Will Travel, Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, Bat Masterson, and Maverick are just a few TV Westerns where she appeared.
Montell portrayed a lady on Earth in the 26th century, hundreds of years after a horrific atomic war, who falls in love with an unintentionally time-traveling astronaut (Taylor) in the science fiction film World Without End (1956), written and directed by Edward Bernds.
She also played sisters in Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), the first movie Martin made after he and Jerry Lewis split up their act, alongside Lisa Gaye, Eva Bartok, and Anna Maria Alberghetti in Rome.
Irena Ludmilla Vladimiovna Augustinovich, born in Warsaw on July 5, 1933, emigrated to the United States with her family before the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. They made New York City their home.
She relocated to Lima, Peru, when her dad, Walery, accepted a position with a mining firm after completing her drama studies at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, the High School of Performing Arts, and the University of Miami.
She was discovered in a play in 1953, had her acting debut in the Peruvian film The Daughter of the Sun God, which wouldn’t be released until 1962, and moved to Los Angeles after her father passed away.
She appeared in the 1955 films Escape to Burma, Jump Into Hell, Daddy Long Legs, Finger Man, and Pearl of the South Pacific. In the 1956 picture, Gaby, starring Leslie Caron, she played a ballet dancer.
Her list of credits also included episodes of The Millionaire, Wire Service, The Ann Sothern Show, Surfside 6, Mike Hammer, The Magical World of Walt Disney, and 77 Sunset Strip, as well as the movies Tomahawk Trail (1957), The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958), and The Firebrand (1962).
She stopped acting in the middle of the 1960s, collaborated with Tom Bradley on a local TV program, and worked in his administration after he was elected mayor of Los Angeles.
She is survived by her granddaughter Tatiana and her daughter, who she had with her husband, actor David Janti.
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