At present, little is known about the European actress
and dancer Aurora de Alba. Her film
career is varied, although consisting mostly of rare, hard-to-find movies, with
a handful of Spanish horror films being the most well-known and accessible. What little I
could find out is that her name was Aurora Galisteo before being known as Aurora de Alba, and she is the cousin of famed Spanish dancer/actress Carmen Sevilla,
who was born Maria del Carmen Garcia
Galisteo. This would also make Aurora
cousins with Spanish cinematographer Jose
Garcia Galisteo. Aurora danced at
the Venice Film Festival in 1953, from which a number of historical photos were
made. She married Chico Scimone on June 23, 1954, in Taormina, Sicily, and later had a son, Gianfranco Scimone on March 11, 1955. She died February 24th, 2005.
Throughout the ‘50s,
Aurora starred in a number of
Spanish/Italian comedies and dramas, most of which seem to either have been
forgotten or fallen into obscurity. As the Euro film industry shifted its
output to different genres in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Aurora managed to land roles in Euro-westerns: Un hombre vino a matar (1967) and Su le mani, cadavere! Sei in arresto (1971) (under the direction of
Leon Klimovsky); Euro-spies, Agente X 1-7 operazione Oceano (1965)
and Top Secret (1967); and Euro-horrors
La Marca del Hombre-lobo (1968), La rebelión de las muertas (1973), and La orgía de los muertos (1973). The
three aforementioned horror films also starred Paul Naschy and seem to have been the most accessible. In addition,
she was frequently directed by José Luis
Merino. After starring in a line of comedies and dramas in the latter half
of the ‘70s, her movie career seemed to have taken an abrupt halt at the end of
the decade. What she was up to after that is probably anyone’s guess.
Some
sources list her as an Italian actress,
while others show her as a Spanish actress. Aurora is actually of Spanish origin, however she did get married in Italy and most likely lived there for a time. Another source lists her birth date as February 2nd, 1948;
this cannot be true, however, because, as was mentioned before, she was married in 1954, and the following image of her below is from the 1953 Venice Film
Festival, and looking to be somewhere in her early twenties at that time, it is
probably not a far cry to assume she was born sometime in the ‘20s or ‘30s.
Born in Guarda, Portugal, May 29th, 1951, the
delectable and very statuesque Britt
Nichols (born Marìa do Carmo da
Resurreição de Deus) has enjoyed a successful fashion modeling career in
Argentina for over 35 years under her more common name Carmen Yazalde, and, looking better than ever, she continues to
model to this day, hosting cable TV shows and appearing frequently in the media.
A former Miss Portugal, Nichols
married an Argentinian soccer player on July 16th, 1973, European Golden Shoe winner Héctor Yazalde, and moved from Portugal
to Argentina in 1977 and has stayed there ever since.
When reading articles
about the fashion model Carmen Yazalde
on the web, as far as I could tell, there didn’t seem to be any mention of her
cinema career in the early ‘70s. As I have found on a thread from the Latarnia Forums, she apparently does
not wish to discuss that period of her career but claims to still be proud of
the films she has been in; the bulk of which consists of films directed by the
late, great Jess Franco. She also appeared
in Amando De Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead and a giallo by
Juan Bosch, The Killer with a Thousand Eyes.
Nichols left cinema behind shortly after getting married,
but her relatively small body of work in film is fondly remembered and embraced
by Eurocult movie fans. She is commonly seen in Franco films with Anne
Libert (our favorite woman-in-black) and is perhaps heavily remembered as the
sapphic vampire lead in Daughter of
Dracula and more so as the bizarre, living-dead bombshell haunting the ancestral castle
of the title character in A Virgin Among
the Living Dead.
French actress Mireille
Dargent acted in six movies, four of which were for
director Jean Rollin. The one she’s
most known for is a Rollin film where
her presence reverberated inside my memory, ever since I saw it. This film is Requiem for a Vampire, where the sultry
redhead appears alongside one-half of the Castel
twins, Marie-Pierre Castel. The two actresses
play a couple of inseparable lovers, who after escaping some sort of crime heist,
curiously dressed as clowns, eventually find themselves in vampire territory. Interestingly
enough, we are introduced to this clown couple and their male companion at the
start of the film in a high speed chase with guns blazing. After losing their
pursuers, their male companion passes away, not surviving his gunshot wound. The two clowns, named
Michelle (Dargent) and Marie (Castel), set fire to their car, with the deceased’s body inside of it, before travelling off on foot and on
their own. When they wash off the paint and lose their clown getup, it’s
revealed, not surprisingly, that there were a couple of attractive girls
underneath the clown makeup.
Kali
Hansa, born Marisol
Hernández, sort of put a spell on me with her role as Tunika in Amando de Ossorio’s THE NIGHT OF THE
SORCERERS. I would have dreams that were kind of like my own imagined sequel to
the film, where, in a sickly state, I would travel to the African forest where
this film took place. Knowing my time was running short, due to some sort of
terminal illness, I would travel up a mountain and to a place where I knew I
would find Tunika, in her vampire form. Longing to end my suffering, I would
find her in a shallow moonlit river where she would welcome me, and through an
act of vampiric intercourse, she would make me like her, curing me, making me
immortal, and also inflicting her curse upon me.
Thus is the effect her
presence in THE NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS had on me. With her constantly lingering
in my mind, I eventually viewed several more films that she was in, sometimes
credited as Gaby Herman or Kali Hansen. I was slightly saddened to find out
that she was usually just a supporting/minor character and had an acting career
that didn’t really take off, and it seemed to have ended circa 1976 after
shooting a hardcore porno for Jess Franco, WHITE SKIN BLACK THIGHS and an erotic comedy, GIRLS IN THE NIGHT TRAFFIC. Despite usually having small roles and frequently
being killed off, she visually stood out the most amongst other characters and gave off an ‘Oh-wow, who’s-that?’
impression. She apparently vanished after filming her last movie. She is from Cuba and was the girlfriend of Alberto Dalbes.
(Rumor bin: According to Jess Franco she moved back to Cuba to use her exceptional strength to fight against Fidel Castro!!!)
For this tribute to Kali Hansa, and possibly a new series for AT
THE MANSION OF MADNESS (Venomous Vixens), I’ve organized a few thoughts and
images from a selection of some of her films.
