Maila nurmi biography
In January of , Maila Nurmi, better known as Vampira, was found dead in her small Los Angeles home. She was She died alone, on her couch with her feet propped, resting on a patio chair. The TV was running. Her cat, Violet, had died next to her. Her dog, Houdini, was alive but had to be put down. In her last days, she had felt exhausted, but thought it was due to her thyroid. It turned out to be her heart that was failing.
It's a death that arguably could be described as tragic. However, it's an example of Nurmi's survival instincts. She made the decisions in her life. Relying on chance, or others, had harmed her too much during plus years since she stepped off a bus in Los Angeles in
Maila was also Vampira, a host whose weekly scream during the staid s represented an orgasm. The censors, of course, never knew that. Several dozen episodes hosting a horror movies show gained her short-term fame in the s. Her brief appearance in Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space," a film she acted in for $ and didn't see until , plus years after its small release, re-ignited interest in her dark beauty and gothic, sexual look. Below is a picture with Bela Lugosi. Ironically, he didn't plan on being in "Plan 9 From Outer Space," either.
After the "Plan 9 From Outer Space"/Ed Wood cultural craze, we saw our share of Maila in a slew of documentaries, and interviews and writings in books and magazines. She teased those interested with tidbits of information about experiences with Orson Welles and Elvis Presley, jobs with Mae West and Liberace, meals with an Ed Wood crony, Criswell, and her friendship with James Dean. But there always seemed to be more to the story.
Four years after her death, friend and filmmaker R.H. Greene provided a deeply personal, fascinating documentary, "Vampira and Me," that filled gaps in the often-coy past reminisces from the late actress. Frankly, despite a couple of other books and an earlier film documentary, "Vampira Maila Nurmi came to Hollywood in the s, dreaming of fame and fortune. And after more than a decade of ups and downs, she had, briefly, attained it. She achieved international renown as Vampira, the world’s first horror movie TV host, setting the standard for what a horror queen femme fatale should aspire to, as well as laying the groundwork for the goth look decades before its time. Her cult status was further assured by her role in Ed Wood’s classic no-budget feature Plan 9 From Outer Space. And over the course of her eventful life, she crossed paths with numerous legends: James Dean, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley. But that was then. When her niece, Sandra Niemi, cleared out her aunt’s apartment after her death in , she found that Maila Nurmi had died in poverty. The only pieces of furniture she owned were a sofa and a plastic patio chair. Friends had often paid her rent, or the phone bill. But amidst her other possessions — the clothes, the memorabilia, the 30 pounds of beads — Sandra made an astonishing discovery. Maila had been chronicling her story over the years, “Pages and pages and pages of handwritten writings,” Sandra says. “Letters that she either forgot to mail, or it was a first draft. Scraps of paper, just a sentence or two, written in the margin of a calendar or a newspaper. Or just a scrap of paper by itself, sometimes wadded up and put in a pocket of an old jacket or a purse. Just a memory here and a memory there.” When Sandra gathered up all the bits and pieces, they filled two plastic garbage bags. “I knew I had to put this together. And I wasn’t thinking ‘book.’ I was thinking, I’m going to find out who Maila is, and what she did with her life. What I always wanted to know and never could find out.” But this was a tale that begged to be told to a wider audience, and over the next twelve years, Maila Nurmi’s niece sifted through her aunt’s writings, added her own research, and finally published Glamour Ghoul: The Pa Finnish-American actress and television personality (–) Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi (December 11, – January 10, ), known professionally as Maila Nurmi, was a Finnish-American actress who created the campy s character Vampira. She was raised in Astoria, Oregon, where she worked in tuna and salmon canneries. She relocated to Los Angeles in , with hopes of becoming an actress. After several minor film roles, she found success with her Vampira character, television's first horror host. Nurmi hosted her own series, The Vampira Show, from to , on KABC-TV. After the show's cancellation, she appeared in the cult filmPlan 9 from Outer Space, directed by Ed Wood. She is also billed as Vampira, despite not playing the character, in the films The Beat Generation, where she plays a beatnik poet, and crime film The Big Operator. She was portrayed by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's biopic, Ed Wood. Maila Nurmi was born to Onni Niemi (earlier Syrjäniemi), a Finnish immigrant, and Sophia Peterson, an American of Finnish descent. Her place of birth was at one time disputed: According to biographer W. Scott Poole in Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror (), she was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. During her career, she claimed to have been born in Petsamo, Finland, claiming she was the niece of Finnish athlete Paavo Nurmi, who began setting long-distance running world records in , the year before her birth. Public U.S. immigration records show her father's immigration at Ellis Island in Additionally, Dana Gould claimed in a public interview that he had seen Nurmi's birth certificate, which listed her birthplace as Gloucester, Massachusetts. In her personal diary, Nurmi admitted the Petsamo story was fiction. During her childhood, Nurmi relocated with her family from Massachusetts to Ashtabula, Ohio, before settling in Astoria, Oregon, a city on the Oregon Coa In , a year old former model, nightclub coat-check attendant and necktie painter named Maila Nurmi attended a Hollywood party with her husband, actor-writer Dean Riesner. She made her own vampire costume, inspired by the cartoons of Charles Addams, out of fabric scraps. She must have cut quite a profile because months later another attendee at that party still remembered her. He was Hunt Stromberg, Jr, the newly installed program director at WABC-TV in Los Angeles. At the time, movies were shown only infrequently on television. The major studios were not much interested in cooperating with the small screen &#; and in fact considered it a mortal threat &#; so most of the feature films available to broadcast were from such &#;poverty row&#; operations as Monogram and PRC. Stromberg&#;s idea was to add some sex appeal to his channel&#;s late night horror movie screenings. He remembered the vampiric Nurmi but he did not know her name, or how to get in touch with her. Fortunately the designer Rudi Gernreich remembered her name and Stromberg hired her to create a vampire character who would not, however, infringe upon any existing copyrights or trademarks. Nurmi got to work at once on a look for her character, which she christened Vampira. She combined elements of Snow White&#;s Evil Queen, a comic strip dragon lady and under-the-counter bondage models. To exaggerate her already waspish waistline she strapped a flesh-wasting poultice of meat tenderizer to her midsection with a tightly-bound rubber inner tube. Her measurements were advertised as She took to wearing Vampira drag whenever she left the house, and even rented an appropriately funereal looking black Packard convertible for her jaunts around town. She became a celebrity in the nightclubs and jazz-clubs of LA. It was here that she met James Dean, who became fixated on her. The feeling was mutual, and they became close companions, often crui Maila Nurmi
Early life
The Incredible But True Story of Maila &#;Vampira&#; Nurmi