HOLLYWOOD: The Ring -a- Ding Girl

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May Britt, 23, (married, no children), with her long, lovingly curved figure, long, Chablis-colored hair and lean, finely freckled legs, began her career, incredibly enough, playing the part of a boy. But Italian Producer Carlo Pond soon saw the error of his ways; he had not brought her from Stockholm for that. May (rhymes with sigh) came to California in 1957, made The Young Lions, The Hunters, and now, as a fresh young remake of Dietrich (without pretensions to a singing voice), she is remaking Blue Angel.

Carolyn Jones, 26 (married, no children), is a bop-talking hipster with a grim determination to do anything necessary to keep from going home to Amarillo. In the process she has had her nose bobbed, has dyed her hair brunette and fought her way through a series of gun-moll parts to meaty roles in The Bachelor Party and Marjorie Morningstar, and now in Career and Hole in the Head. A pop-eyed comedienne with a yen to play "just a plain girl," Carolyn also yearns for a place in the high-style Hollywood of sleek white limousines and sunken bathtubs. She is just about there. "We're coming into the golden age of the movies," she insists, "and that'll be a gas, boy."

Lee Remick, 23 (married, one child), is a well-heeled, self-possessed, finishing-school type. "I'm a lady, unashamedly," says Lee. "I never had to starve to death, and I could always afford to be choosy about parts." Being choosy kept her smooth, even features, her tawny blonde hair on TV until Elia Kazan made her a drum majorette in Face in the Crowd. Later she did The Long Hot Summer and a so-so western called Three Thousand Hills. Now she is stoking up for a personal appearance tour to promote her biggest and best part yet: the Army wife whose barroom flirtation results in rape and murder in Anatomy of a Murder.

Inger Stevens, 24, started right at the top. A cool, Nordic blonde with an oddly piquant mouth, she played the female leads in the only four movies she has made (Man on Fire; Cry Terror; The Buccaneer; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil). Dancing in the line at Manhattan's Latin Quarter paid for acting lessons with Lee Strasberg after her family came to the U.S. from Stockholm; then TV plays and summer stock primed her for Hollywood. Moody and shy about her Swedish accent, Inger, for all her fast start, is still mostly promise.

Diane Baker, 21, came to Los Angeles' Van Nuys High School ten years after Marilyn Monroe and sat at Marilyn's desk. There the similarity ends; compared to Marilyn's frank and proud carnal charm, Diane's fresh, almost solemn simplicity seems to belong to a teen-age prom. Ballet lessons, drama lessons, TV, modeling—all the standard preparation—got her ready to play Millie Perkins' sister in The Diary of Anne Frank. Now, in The Best of Everything, she will get a chance to prove that she can turn on something else besides slender, hazel-eyed girlishness.

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