Stella Stevens, star of The Nutty Professor, has died at the age of 84.

Stella Stevens, a prominent comedy actress of the 1960s and 70s best known for her role as Jerry Lewis’s object of affection in The Nutty Professor, has died. She was 84 years old.

The Stevens estate says she died Friday in Los Angeles after a long illness.

Born Estelle Caro Eggleston in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1938, she married at 16 and had her first and only child, actor and producer Andrew Stevens, in 1955 when she was 17 and divorced two years later. She began acting and modeling while attending Memphis State University and made her film debut with a supporting role in Bing Crosby’s musical Tell Me One in 1959, but she considered Little Abner to be her big break.

“The head of publicity at Paramount basically made me a global sex symbol,” Stevens told FilmTalk in 2017. the best restaurants, meetings with great actors and directors… those were the golden years of Hollywood. It was a very exciting time.”

Shortly thereafter, she won a Golden Globe from New Star, was named the Playboy Playmate of the Month, and received a contract with Paramount Pictures, which led to film work and Girls! Girls! Girls!” with Elvis Presley, to which she only agreed because she was promised to star in a Montgomery Clift film if she did. According to her, it was a terrible six days of filming due to director Norman Torog’s short temper, though she said, that Presley was sweet. The Clift picture didn’t work out either, at least with her promised co-star. It turned into John Cassavetes’ “Too Late Blues” with Bobby Darrin.

“Bobby was a great actor, but as you can imagine, he was not Montgomery Clift,” she said.

Then came The Nutty Professor as Lewis’ student, Stella Purdy, whom he is crazy about.

“Jerry Lewis told the Paramount bosses that he wanted to pick the most beautiful ingenue working in the studio – or something like that – and so I got the offer,” she said. “We all tried to make the characters he created in the script special, wonderful, unique – and if you ask me, I believe that’s why the film is still relevant after all these years.”

At Columbia Pictures, she appeared in The Secret of My Success, The Silencers with Dean Martin, and Where Angels Go That Trouble Follows as a nun alongside Rosalind Russell. Other notable roles include Carnage with Jim Brown, Sam Peckinpah’s TV movie The Battle of Cable Hog, and Poseidon’s Adventure in which she played Linda Rogo, the wife of Ernest Borgnine’s character.

Stevens worked full-time on television in the 1970s and 80s, appearing in pilots for Wonder Woman, Heart to Heart, and Love Boat, as well as series such as Night Court, Murder, She Wrote” and “Magnum”. PI”

She said in 2017 that her favorite director she worked with was Vincente Minelli in 1963’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. She also directed several films, the documentary American Heroine, which never received a release, and The Ranch. She retired in 2010.

In a 1994 interview, Stevens said that she was worried that she had failed to bring out the best in her directors and that her ambitions had changed.

“I wanted to be like my favorite actresses: Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. I wanted to be like an explosion of youth, and then when I got crow’s feet or age, I would go off the screen, ”she said.” But I also had a plan to be a director… I saw (Bob Hope) at 83 joking and having fun. I then said that I never wanted to quit. I want to be like this person. I want to go on forever. I want to die on set.”