The Prehistoric Women • Laurette Luez - Tigri

Who were the “Prehistoric Women” who made cinematic history with just 17 days of footage shot mainly on a studio sound stage?

Laurette Luez - Tigri

 

Tigri, the leader of the female clan, was played by Laurette Luez, an Hawaii-born beauty who had some uncredited bit parts in both Cecil B. DeMille’s 1944 film release of The Story of Dr. Wassell and director John Cromwell’s 1946 period piece, Anna and the King of Siam.   In 1947, while testing for the Tyrone Power film, Nightmare Alley, she met fellow actor Philip Sudano and they married in August of that year.

By January of 1949, she made the Los Angeles papers with news of her divorce from Sudano.  She testified during the divorce hearing that he would beat her.  She also testified that when she gave birth to her son, Alexander, she thought that things would change, but they didn’t, they got worse.  She waived alimony, but was awarded $50 a month in child support.  

With a three-month-old child to take care of, Luez turned to modeling to pay the rent as that fifty bucks a month in child support wasn’t going to be quite enough to get by on.  By November, the American Fashion Stylists were calling her “the perfect model.” 

She got a break in August of 1949 when she was cast as Maria Rakubian in the Edmond O’Brien film noir thriller, D.O.A., which had a one-week “preview” showing at the Music Hall in Los Angeles during the last of December and then rolled out nationwide in 1950.

In November of 1949, various Hollywood gossip columns had the nugget that Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. and Luez were hot and heavy.   About the same time it was announced that “Nightwear Modeling Wins Part in Film,” which was producer Lindsley Parsons signing Luez to co-star with Roddy McDowell in Killer Shark (she’s on her way to location shooting in Ensenada, Mexico).

Note, Killer Shark was not a precursor to Jaws, it’s actually a coming-of-age fishing story.

By February of 1950 the same gossip columns were reporting that Goldwyn and Luez had broken off their engagement and in casting news she will playing opposite Errol Flynn in director Victor Saville’s adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. 

By early March Killer Shark is in theatres nationwide.   And later the same month her studio work for Kim had been completed and she was looking for something else, which just happened to be Prehistoric Women — as mentioned Cohen went into production on April 27 and wrapped May 13.

On the rebound from her breakup with Goldwyn, she impulsively marries the director of Prehistoric Women, Gregg G. Tallas in June … and divorces him in September!

Luez had a series of small film roles over the next few years, branched into television, landed the part of Karamaneh in the short-lived The Adventures of Fu Manchu series and finished up as Felina in writer/director Bill Ward’s 1963 Western, The Ballad of a Gunfigher, starring Marty Robbins.   Felina is, of course, the Mexican maiden with eyes blacker than night that Robbins sings about in his iconic 1959 ballad, “El Paso.”

Married to Robert Creel, she exits show business and moves to Florida.   That would normally be the end of it, but Burl Burlingame, writing in the Honolulu Star Bulletin in October of 1999 had a very sweet feature column about Luez and one of her fans, Richard Blackburn.   It seems that he had a coveted VHS copy of Prehistoric Women and had been a fan of Luez since he was eight and in the late ‘90s reached out to her … nothing ventured, nothing gained sort of thing.

As Burlingame relates it, “They became telephone friends and confessors,” and then in September of 1999 Blackburn received an email from Luez’s daughter, Claudia, that her mother had died at age 71 from lingering health issues.  Tigri was gone.