I really liked this Twilight Zone actress when I was a kid
Phyllis Kirk, who starred opposite Keenan Wynn in the last show of the first season of TWZ in an episode entitled "A World Of His Own". In the episode, Wynn played the role of a writer who can conjure up anything by speaking it into a dictation machine. He conjured up a beautiful blonde, much to the displeasure of his wife. Finally, unable to take his wife anymore, he erased the tape and she disappeared. She was also a product of his ability to make his imaginings become real. It was a memorable episode to me when I saw it in its original airing.
Phyllis Kirk was stalked by a maniacal sculptor, Vincent Price, in the horror film The House Of Wax.
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But it was in the 1950s TV mystery series The Thin Man that I truly loved her. She was very elegant, thin, classy, and poised, like a TV version of Audrey Hepburn. I had a crush on her in the 1950s when I was a preteen as a result of the series in which she played opposite Peter Lawford as the crime-solving duo Nick and Nora Charles.
A liberal Democrat and a feminist, she became an active campaigner in the late 1950s against capital punishment for the ACLU. Before the California Assembly, she spoke against the death sentence of Caryl Chessman, nicknamed the "Red Light Bandit," who had been convicted on seventeen counts of kidnapping, robbery, rape and sexual assault. She visited him in prison several times before he was executed in 1960. The notoriety this created effectively led to the end of her acting career. After the Watts Riots, she worked to develop programs for the assistance of impoverished families in Los Angeles. She died on October 19, 2006.
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