Hollywood star Mara Corday dies at home from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease

Hollywood star Mara Corday has died at home in California from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Known as a Hollywood starlet in the 1950s, Mara Corday was born Marilyn Watts but decided to change her name to Mara as she considered it more exotic.

An online biography for Mara Corday reveals that she was born to parents Emerson Watts and Shirley Wood on January 3, 1930, and her family suffered financial difficulties during the Depression era.

According to the biography, “As a child, she possessed both an outgoing personality and active imagination, and with her elder brother Richard, often spent entire days at the local movie theatres (for merely a nickel), viewing each film more than twice. She knew just about every line in the movies to come through town and her interest in the cinema and show business at large, like many depression babies, inspired in her dreams of grandeur.”

When it came to changing her surname Watts, Mara opted for Corday which was a brand of perfume. In 1958, Marta Corday appeared in Playboy and was one of the magazine’s Playmates of the Month in October.

Thanks to signing with Hollywood agent Paul Kohner, Mara Corday landed TV roles in The Adventures of Kit Carson and Craig Kennedy, Criminologist, she also appeared in the 1951 movie Two Tickets to Broadway and Problem Girls in 1953.

Mara Corday also starred opposite John Agar in the 1955 movie Tarantula and also appeared in the 1957 movie The Giant Claw and The Black Scorpion. The Washington Post reported that “The Giant Claw” (1957) put her up against a monster bird flying at supersonic speed. (Ms. Corday was newly pregnant while filming the movie and did not reveal her condition to her onset colleagues for fear that she would not be permitted to keep the part.)”

Mara Corday married fellow actor Richard Long in 1957, the couple had three children together. She later revealed that he had restricted her career and in an interview which was published in the book, ‘Westerns Women’ Mara said: “I divorced him ten times the first year of our marriage, getting a lawyer and everything, and thirteen times the second year. He’d plead — literally on his hands and knees, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t know why I did it, give me another chance.”

Mara Corday’s husband died in 1974 and she credited Clint Eastwood in resurrecting her career after his death. Thanks to Eastwood, she landed a role in the 1977 action thriller The Gauntlet and appeared in Sudden Impact in 1983.

Mara Corday appeared alongside Clint Eastwood in Pink Cadillac in 1989 and The Rookie in 1990 which were her final movie credits. According to The Washington Post, “Ms. Corday had three children, Carey, Valerie and Greg, but a complete list of survivors could not be confirmed. Efforts to reach her family were not immediately successful.”