Nancy Kovack

Nancy Kovack's acting career was short-lived for an unusual reason: not scandal, or drugs, or unpopularity, but rather, simply and sweetly, love. After only a decade of film and TV roles, Kovack formed a lasting relationship with celebrated conductor Zubin Mehta and decided to focus her life on her marriage. Even in her few years as an entertainer, though, she made an indelible mark. Novack is perhaps most recognized as Medea, the spurned (and vengeful) sorceress in 1963's "Jason and the Argonauts," a stop-motion film about the mythical quest for the Golden Fleece (though Jason's legendary abandonment of Medea is omitted from the movie, ensuring that his character stays in the good graces of theatergoing audiences). That same year, Novack played another romantic interest who is not so kindly spared from an unfortunate on-screen fate; in "Diary of a Madman," she portrayed the avaricious Odette Mallotte, whose gold-digging gets her in over her head with a magistrate possessed by an evil spirit. Years later, Kovack played a wife in another terrifying situation: fear that her astronaut husband might not return from his mission aboard a space station. Real-life astronaut Jim Lovell took his own wife to see the film "Marooned" less than a year before he went into space, and the viewing purportedly added to her anxiety about the possibility of his experiencing a similar disaster (as he indeed would, on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission to the Moon).

Filmography

Cast (Feature Film)

Marooned (1969)

Teresa Stone

Enter Laughing (1967)

Miss B

The Silencers (1966)

Barbara

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)

Sophia

Frankie and Johnny (1966)

Nellie Bly

Sylvia (1965)

Big Shirley

The Great Sioux Massacre (1965)

Libbie Custer

The Outlaws IS Coming (1965)

Annie Oakley

Diary of a Madman (1963)

Odette Duclasse

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

Medea

The Wild Westerners (1962)

Rose Sharon

Cry for Happy (1961)

Miss Cameron

Life Events

Photo Collections

Jason and the Argonauts - Color Still Set

Here is a set of color stills from Columbia Pictures' Jason and the Argonauts (1963). For certain prestigious color productions, studios would send out sets of color stills as promotional material.

Marooned - Movie Poster

Here is the American one-sheet movie poster for Marooned (1969), starring Gregory Peck, David Janssen, and Gene Hackman. One-sheets measured 27x41 inches, and were the poster style most commonly used in theaters.