Gabriella Licudi

Gabriella Licudi was born Gabrielle Carmen Stuttard, the only child of Wilfred James Stuttard, a naval engineer from Northern Ireland, and Olga Maria Licudi of Gibraltar, from whom she took her stage name. After seeing a film dealing with the education of deaf mutes, Gabriella was so moved she decided to become a teacher of elocution. To help prepare for her chosen profession she enrolled in courses at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was spotted by an agent while performing in a class production in 1961. Accepting an offer from the Citizen's Theatre of Glasgow, a week before departing for Scotland Gabriella "gate-crashed" an audition for a new stage play, John Mortimer's "Two Stars for Comfort", starring Trevor Howard. The play was a hit and ran for nine months in London's West End. Producer Samuel Bronston attended a performance and offered Gabriella a small role in his upcoming epic The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). Gabriella went on to appear in several more films & popular television series, including the title role in the sci-fi cult classic Unearthly Stranger (1963), as a widowed expatriate opposite Patrick McGoohan in an episode of Secret Agent (1964), one of the conspiratorial McTarry daughters in the Bond-spoof extravaganza Casino Royale (1967), in the Henry Hathaway African adventure The Last Safari (1967), and the female lead in the legendary and little-seen experimental feature Herostratus (1967) by Don Levy. Gabriella left films in the 1970s and relocated to Africa, where she and her South African husband ran a safari lodge for several years before she eventually returned to London to run her own production company.