Gloria Dea, Hollywood starlet who also blazed a trail with her conjuring act in 1940s Las Vegas – obituary

Gloria Dea, who has died aged 100, enjoyed a brief but glamorous film career during the golden age of Hollywood; she was also the first known magician to perform in Las Vegas, when on May 14 1941 she appeared in two shows at El Rancho Vegas, a hotel-casino on what later became the Strip.

Between magic tricks, Gloria Dea (pronounced Day) danced to music performed by the hotel’s house band, including tunes such as the Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields number You Couldn’t Be Cuter. “I did the rumba, because it was difficult to keep setting up all my magic stuff,” she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, adding that she specialised in a billiard-balls routine and a floating-card trick.

She recalled performing in a large room. “You had the audience seated, then floor-to-ceiling glass in the back, and on the other side was the swimming pool,” she said, adding that she most enjoyed being showered with applause. “It felt good. Any time someone likes something that you do, you feel good, don’t you? Oh yeah.”

On the big screen Gloria Dea’s one leading role was in the film serial King of the Congo (1952) playing Princess Pha, a native woman who leads the African “Rock People” in their rescue of Captain Drum (Buster Crabbe, a former Tarzan) when he crash-lands his aircraft in a remote area of the jungle.

Elsewhere she was Faradine in Richard Thorpe’s biblical epic The Prodigal (1955), based on the parable of the prodigal son and starring Lana Turner. She also had a small role as a mourner at Bela Lugosi’s funeral in Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957), a science-fiction horror movie that became a cult classic after being named “the worst film ever made” in Michael and Harry Medved’s book The Golden Turkey Awards (1980).

She was born Gloria Day Metzner in Oakwood, California, on August 25 1922, the only child of Leo Metzner, a paint salesman and magician known as “the Great Leo” from whom she learnt her earliest tricks, and his wife Martha, née Heyman.

At the age of seven she featured in the Oakland Tribune as “the youngest working magician in the world”, making a coin disappear in a glass of water, pulling pigeons out of hats and changing a matchbox into a playing card and back.

She changed her name to Dea in 1938 and the following year performed opposite Johnny Weissmuller, another screen Tarzan, in Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a music, dance and swimming show that visited the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

Gloria Dea took her conjuring show to Las Vegas in 1941, with a contemporary press account describing how “Miss Dea completely mystified the audience with her legerdemain.” But by 1944 she was in Hollywood, where she married Jack Statham, an orchestra leader. Work schedules had made it difficult to find time to tie the knot, so during filming of Delightfully Dangerous (1945), in which she played a clown dancer, the producer Charles Rogers paused proceedings and they made their vows on set.

Her film career included an appearance (billed as Gloria De Werd) as a dancer in Mexicana (1945), about a “Mexican Frank Sinatra” fighting off his adoring female fans. She became involved with the American Guild of Variety Artists, though by the end of the 1950s her performing days were over.

Meanwhile, her elaborate home decor had been attracting press interest. This included curtains that she decorated using elaborate tracings of a saucy Dutch girl and boy, making them stand out with beads that were stuck on with adhesive rather than being sewn. She also used charcoal, oil paint and Italian gold leaf to create large murals of Greek gods including Zeus, Apollo and Eros. “The gods have nothing to say about it,” she said. “I put them where I feel they belong.”

She joined the B’nai Brith faith, sold insurance and worked in sales for a Chevrolet car dealership, a rare woman in the industry. Having moved back to Las Vegas in 1980 she was rediscovered in 2001 when AnnaRose Einarsen, a television magician-hypnotist, spotted one of her skirts in a vintage clothing shop and made inquiries about its previous owner.

Her 100th birthday was celebrated there last year in the company of several magicians including David Copperfield, the American illusionist. She also continued to perform magic tricks for the residents of her retirement home.

Gloria Dea divorced her first husband after four months because he refused to kiss her. “Either he was smoking a cigarette or his pants [trousers] were just pressed,” she said. In 1946 she married Hal Borne, Fred Astaire’s rehearsal pianist. That too was dissolved and in 1956 she married Jack Shulem, an official with the International Typographical Union. Her fourth husband, whom she married in 1976, was Sam Anzalone, a car salesman; he died in January 2022.

Gloria Dea, born August 25 1922, died March 18 2023