Betta St John, actress who played opposite Cary Grant, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee – obituary

Betta St John, who has died aged 93, was an actress, singer and dancer who worked in the West End, on Broadway, in Hollywood – and later in the British film industry, notably alongside Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee.

She was born Betty Jean Striegler on November 26 1929 in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles, to parents who had early ambitions for her, signing her up to the Meglin Kiddies troupe (other alumni included Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Farley Granger).

Ethel Meglin steered her towards several small parts, including that of a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz, but she had to turn it down as the family were traveling at the time. She rather regretted this in later life – “It would have ensured me a place in the annals of Hollywood history.”

Her first screen role, uncredited, was as a girl singing in a wagon in the Western Destry Rides Again (1939), starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. She was taken to the German star for her approval, she recalled: “I was extremely nervous. She was wearing her dance hall outfit and had gold glitter in her hair. My eyes nearly popped out when I saw her.”

Betta played a tap dancer auditioning for a talent contest in one of the “Our Gang” comedy shorts, Waldo’s Last Stand (1940), and a blind orphan the following year in the drama Lydia, with Joseph Cotten and Merle Oberon, while on the set of Jane Eyre (1943) she met her fellow newcomer Elizabeth Taylor. “She was inquisitive,” Betta St John recalled. “Watching Elizabeth’s mother, one could tell she was determined for her daughter to make it.”

The musical team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein took a keen interest in Betta, giving her a cameo in their Broadway musical Carousel in 1945. Four years later they cast her as Liat, the young Tonkinese woman, in South Pacific.

She was in the show when it opened in the West End, and there in 1952 she met the actor and opera singer Peter Grant, who was playing Lt Cable; they married at Caxton Hall that November. Betta John took her new husband back to Hollywood, where a contract with MGM awaited her.

She was soon launched on a series of supporting roles: in 1953 she played a Middle Eastern princess betrothed to Cary Grant in Dream Wife (the trailer billed her as “the screen’s new dream girl”). The same year she was in the Biblical epic The Robe, playing a disabled woman, Miriam, who the Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio hears singing a song about Christ’s crucifixion. When he remarks that Jesus clearly did not heal her, she tells him that he cured her of hatred and malice, a far greater gift.

Also in 1953 she appeared as “Native Girl” in All Brothers Were Valiant, concerning fighting siblings played by Stewart Granger and Robert Taylor, who trade blows over her and a bounty of pearls. The following year she was loaned out to RKO for the tame 3-D thriller Dangerous Mission, with Victor Mature and Vincent Price, and was Princess Johanna of Nordhausen in The Student Prince.

Betta St John went on to have two turns opposite the loincloth-clad Gordon Scott, in Tarzan and the Lost Safari (1957) – the first Tarzan film in colour, in which Scott’s noble savage rescues the survivors of an air crash – and the British-made Tarzan the Magnificent (1960), in which she played half of a married couple captured by locals; her windbag husband was played by Lionel Jeffries.

This came two years after another British-American production, the horror Corridors of Blood, starring Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. Because of changes at MGM its release was delayed until 1962, when it came out in a double bill with the Italian import Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory.

By then she had made her final film, The City of the Dead (1960), starring Christopher Lee, an account of witchcraft-related goings-on in a Massachusetts town.

Betta St John retired to support her husband’s career and bring up their three children in Britain. He died in 1992, and she moved back to California.

Betta St John, born November 26 1929, died June 23 2023