Inger Stevens (October 18, 1934 – April 30, 1970) was a Golden Globe-winning, Emmy-nominated Swedish-American movie and TV actress.
Stevens was an insecure and often ill child. Her parents divorced while living in Sweden and when she was nine years-old she moved with her father to New York City. When she was thirteen, she and her father moved to Manhattan, Kansas where she attended high school. At 16, she left home and started to work in New York City as a showgirl in low-budget performances. At the same time she took lessons at the Actors Studio.
She appeared in commercials, plays and TV until she finally got her big chance in the movie Man on Fire, with Bing Crosby. She was also romantically linked to Crosby.
Several roles in major films followed, but she had the greatest success with her leading role in the television series The Farmer's Daughter, and also with roles in TV episodes of series like Bonanza, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Twilight Zone. Ironically, in both of her Twilight Zone performances, she portrays protagonists who believe they are living women but discover they aren't alive after all: in one episode, she has died in a car accident, but doesn't realize it; in the other, she is a robot programmed to believe she is human.
After The Farmer's Daughter was canceled in 1966, Stevens concentrated on movies. The best known of her movie roles were Hang 'Em High with Clint Eastwood, 5 Card Stud with Dean Martin and Madigan with Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark, all in 1968. Stevens was attempting to make a comeback on TV in 1970 with the detective drama series The Most Deadly Game when she died.
Her first husband was her agent Anthony Soglio, to whom she was married from 1955 to 1957. From 1961 to her death she was secretly married to Ike Jones, a black American actor. She also was romantically involved with Anthony Quinn, Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza. She dated Burt Reynolds, as well, shortly before her suicide.
A houseguest found her lying facedown on her kitchen floor on the morning of April 30, 1970, having overdosed on Tedral washed down with alcohol. She was cremated and her ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
