It appears that Disney archivists have confirmed what Maila Nurmi long claimed—she was used in 1956 as a live action model for Maleficent. Given the length of a Disney movie’s production cycle, I don’t think it’s possible to say she was definitively Maleficent; the movie had been in production for five years at that point and wouldn’t come out for four more. And I’ve read, frankly, that Disney’s records are not meticulously kept and that they need a better system. But just because she was prone to exaggeration in some areas doesn’t mean they were all lies; there further seems to be evidence that her relationship with James Dean was closer to the way she described it than the way Hedda Hopper dismissed it.
I do not, that said, believe she had much of a leg to stand on when it came to suing Cassandra Peterson for ripping off the Vampira persona for her own Elvira. True, Elvira seems to have been created as a character when Nurmi, who owned the Vampira character, left a planned remake of the show, taking the name with her. But “sexy Morticia Addams” was, Nurmi herself admitted, pretty much what Vampira was going for. Frankly, the whole persona comes across to me as a cross between Morticia and the Crypt Keeper or other EC host. I doubt she was even the only person in the ’50s to come up with a character like that for a late night horror movie show.
Still, Vampira is the one we will remember. After all, she is the one who ended up wandering around with Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson. I disagree that Plan 9 From Outer Space is the worst movie ever made; I’ve seen more than a few that are worse. On the other hand, it is definitely one of the most notorious, and I’m sure it will long be remembered for that. She apparently chose not to deliver any lines because she believed the lines in the script were terrible—all things considered, she was almost certainly right. She did, however, wish she hadn’t done that, because how much more famous would she have been?
She installed linoleum for a living, after the acting jobs ran out for her. Said she could do carpentry, make drapes, and refinish furniture, too. She had a boutique for a while in the ’60s and made jewelry and clothing. She seems to have made a decent living, even if it wasn’t exactly the way she might have wanted to. I won’t deny that she tended toward self-promotion—she wasn’t born in Finland and almost certainly wasn’t related to Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi. She still seemed to have lived a fairly settled life, in time.
Was she a model for Maleficent? It seems so. Was she friends with James Dean? Harder to determine, but at very least she is known to have visited the set of Rebel Without a Cause, and there is an extant photo of Dean with Vampira’s sidekick. She said Dean was on the show once, but I don’t know if there’s any proof of that. Was Elvira truly a ripoff of Vampira? The courts say no. But it does seem that Nurmi-as-Vampira helped create an archetype. At very least, Elvira had Vampira in her DNA.
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