Luana Walters

Shapely film brunette Luana Walters was one of film western's more sensual prairie flowers during the late 30s and early 40s. She was certainly one of the more decorative distractions in between all those cowboy heroics displayed by her co-stars: Gene Autry, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, Charles Starrett and Bill Elliott. Born July 22, 1912, in the Los Angeles area, she was the second child of a signal operator for the Southern Pacific Railroad. Educated at Ramona Convent in Alhambra, California, her incredible beauty was picked up on early and, by age 18, she had been scouted out and signed by United Artists. She had just appeared unbilled in a single 1930 film and in a San Francisco stage production of "The Shyster" when illness forced her off the screen for a couple of years. When she finally returned, she began working for other independent studios. A spirited, hot-blooded gal with a lovely, exotic allure, she apprenticed and more-than-paid her dues in film bits as a chorus girl, spitfire or floozie type. Her lowbudget career was quite erratic and, for the most part, quite frustrating for her. Other than a handful of westerns and cliffhangers, she remained stuck in the bottom ranks, with numerous unbilled sexy roles in "A" pictures. Campy leads in a couple of exploitive morality mellers came her way that at least brought her a desirous bit of attention. She played a high school teen lured down the road to "reefer madness" in Assassin of Youth (1938), and then headed up the cast that warned of syphilis among WWII soldiers in No Greater Sin (1941). She also co-starred in The Corpse Vanishes (1942) as an intended victim of 'Bela Lugosi (I)''s mad doctor who kills virtuous brides in order to secure an eternal youth potion for his aging wife. As usual, Luana shows her strong side and turns the tables on him. By 1942, Luana's career had all but dissipated and the abrupt death of her actor/husband Max Hoffman Jr. in 1945 at age 42 proved too much for her. She subsequently turned to drink and despair. A "comeback" in the "B" film noir Shoot to Kill (1947) plus a minor part as "Lara", Kirk Alyn's intergalactic mother, in the Superman (1948) serial failed to encourage other work. Other than a few obscure parts here and there in the 50s, she was little seen although she remained in the Los Angeles area for the remainder of her life. On May 19, 1963, at the age of 50, she became another tragic, barely-reported Hollywood statistic when she died from the effects of her alcoholism.