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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Lizabeth Scot, film noir star, dies at 92

Scott
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES – Lizabeth Scott, whose long tawny hair, alluring face and low seductive voice made her an ideal film noir star in the 1940s and ’50s, has died in Los Angeles. She was 92.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that Scott died Jan. 31 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Her longtime friend Mary Goodstein told the newspaper the cause was congestive heart failure.

Film noir, with its hard-bitten Cold War cynicism, captured the imaginations of large numbers of movie fans in the United States, as well as in France, where the name originated, in the years immediately following World War II.

Like Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake, both of whom she resembled, Scott proved a perfect fit for the genre, easily able to play the case-hardened siren who snared and sometimes betrayed the anti-hero male star.

Described by film historian Leonard Maltin as a smoldering blonde who “slithered onto movie screens,” Scott made nearly two dozen films between 1945 and 1957.

She appeared with Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers” (1946), and co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in “Dead Reckoning” (1947), Burt Lancaster in “Desert Fury” (1947), Lancaster and Douglas in “I Walk Alone” (1948), Dick Powell in “Pitfall” (1948) and Charlton Heston in “Dark City” (1950).

Scott all but left the business in the 1950s save for a handful of TV appearances and one more movie, 1972’s “Pulp,” an offbeat British film.

She claimed not to miss the attention.

“I love not having the eyes of the world on me,” she said in 1987. “I never understood adulation from strangers when I was making movies. Basically, I’m shy and always have been.”