Diana Herbert, actress who worked with Marilyn Monroe obituary

Diana Herbert, who has died aged 94, was a Hollywood starlet who worked with Marilyn Monroe; they became friends when they were contract players at 20th Century Fox.

“Marilyn had an aura, there was no doubt about it,” Diana Herbert said in 2005. “But the gloss often turned to dross because of her unreliability… she sometimes seemed overwhelmed.”

The pair were supposed to appear together in Marilyn Monroe’s debut feature Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948), which was directed by Diana’s father, F Hugh Herbert, and also featured a young Natalie Wood. “We photographed pretty well because we were so different in personalities, and it showed somehow,” Diana Herbert said of herself and Marilyn.

But although she recalled the rising star working the camera with aplomb, their scenes together, filmed in a canoe, ended up on the cutting room floor despite the fact that her father was the director (“There was never any favouritism,” she said). She recalled: “When I think about Marilyn I do so with a sense of gratitude as I feel happy to have known her before the peroxide blonde hair and the whole full nine yards.”

Diana Herbert was a Hollywood baby, born on Christmas Day 1928; she recalled how the house was always full of film chatter.

Her father had left Vienna to study at London University then emigrated to the US in 1920. Once installed in Hollywood he carved out a successful career as a writer during the Jazz Age, then with the advent of sound he wrote for such films as the musical We’re in the Money (1935), and the Deanna Durbin vehicle That Certain Age (1938).

Diana left Fairfax High School, where her cousin, another future actress, Kathleen Hughes, also studied, and enrolled at UCLA – but had one career in mind, and her father began securing her bit parts including a plucky schoolgirl in the 1946 hit Jeanne Crain comedy Margie, which was later spun off into a sitcom.

Over the following decade she featured in a string of shows during the days of live television, such as Broadway Television Theatre – in which she appeared in an adaptation of the Broadway play For Love or Money – then into the 1960s and 1970s she featured in episodes of such series as The Ghost and Mrs Muir (spun off from the 1947 romantic fantasy movie starring Rex Harrison) and another fantasy sitcom; The Flying Nun (which featured Sally Field as the titular airborne Sister); and Three’s Company, the US version of Man About the House.

She continued working sporadically until 2011, but despite being the daughter of a director, producer and screenwriter, she never achieved the same level of fame as some of her fellow starlets at 20th Century Fox.

In 1998 she appeared in the mockumentary Welcome to Hollywood (1998). Directed by Adam Rifkin, it was written by Diana Herbert’s son Tony Markes – who also starred as a young actor trying to make it in Hollywood – and featured a host of cameos from stars of the calibre of Julianne Moore, Glenn Close, Will Smith and John Travolta, as well as Britain’s own Ewan McGregor and Mike Leigh.

Her last role was in One-One Thousandth (2011), about a young quadriplegic man’s search for assisted suicide.

In 2022, she was interviewed for the documentary, Dream Girl: The Making of Marilyn Monroe.

Diana Herbert married, first, Lawrence Markes, with whom she had four children. They divorced in 1984, and the following year she married Gene Levitt, the writer and producer who created the hit TV series Fantasy Island. He died in 1999.

Diana Herbert, born December 25 1928, died May 3 2023

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