Venetia Stevenson, British-born Hollywood beauty and staple of gossip-columns, whose face adorned Sweetheart Stout cans – obituary

Venetia Stevenson, who has died aged 84, was a Hollywood starlet and model who was once described as “the most photogenic girl in the world”; her face adorned magazine covers – as well as cans of Tennent’s Sweetheart Stout.

Her father was the British-born director Robert Stevenson, best known for Mary Poppins, The Love Bug and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, while her mother Anna Lee, also born in Britain, was Arthur Conan Doyle’s goddaughter who became known as “The British Bombshell” and starred in How Green Was My Valley.

Joanna Venetia Invicta Stevenson was born in London on March 10 1938, but the family moved within a year to Hollywood, where her father worked for the producer David O Selznick. Her parents divorced when she was six, Venetia staying with her father and her new stepmother, Frances.

She enjoyed a life of privilege: “All those I associated with were movie stars or the children of movie stars. I had no idea of the cost of anything beyond fame. I did witness how in Hollywood youth is everything, and growing old makes people irrelevant.”

By her own admission, Venetia Stevenson only dated celebrities. On St Valentine’s Day 1956, she married Russ Tamblyn before he found fame in Tom Thumb (1958) and West Side Story (1961), but he left her a year later for another starlet, Irish McCalla.

After that she played the field for a few years, and the celebrated Hollywood gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons gave her as many column inches as the likes of Natalie Wood. Her beaus included Elvis Presley, Robert Wagner, Audie Murphy and Guy Madison, earning her the sobriquet of “Hollywood’s Most Dated Doll”.

When she was interviewed for the 2015 documentary Tab Hunter Confidential, Venetia Stevenson revealed that as a client of the agent Dick Clayton, who had a roster of secretly gay actors, she and other actresses such as Debbie Reynolds and Charlotte Austin were used as “beards” to protect closeted actors, including Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins, who had a long-term relationship.

Her career had begun when she was spotted in her teens on the beach in Malibu by the glamour photographer Peter Gowland (son of the British-born actor Gibson Gowland, who had appeared in The Birth of a Nation). She modelled for him, and made the covers of magazines that included Gentlemen’s Quarterly and Esquire.

In 1956 she signed with RKO and was promptly listed among the hottest newcomers by Hedda Hopper. She beat 4,000 hopefuls to the title “the most photogenic girl in the world” for Popular Photography magazine, and was presented with the honour on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was around this time that the George Younger Brewery at Alloa, Clackmannanshire, started using her image on cans of their Sweetheart Stout (later made by Tennent Caledonian).

In acting, meanwhile, she was mostly on television from the mid-1950s, on popular shows such as Cheyenne and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. On the big screen she was in the war film The Young Invaders (1958), in the B-movie favourite Island of Lost Women (1959), the disaster flick Jet Over the Atlantic (1959), starring Guy Madison and her mother, Anna Lee.

In the British horror The City of the Dead (1960), starring Christopher Lee, she was a student researching witchcraft in a spooky Massachusetts town, starring Christopher Lee, and the same year was in the western Seven Ways from Sundown, starring Audie Murphy.

She then confronted the suits at Warner’s, demanding better parts. But she was shown the door, and retired after playing the lead in the 1961 army comedy The Sergeant Was a Lady.

She became a script reader for Burt Reynolds’s production company, and in the 1980s worked as a producer and film consultant. She was also much in demand as a guest at film fairs and retrospectives.

Following Russ Tamblyn, her second husband was Don Everly of the Everly Brothers, whom she married in 1962. They divorced in 1970, and she is survived by their two daughters, Erin – who was briefly married to the Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose – and Stacey, and a son, Edan, the singer-songwriter.

Venetia Stevenson, born March 10 1938, died September 26 2022