Happening This Month

May 4 | 5 Movies

With her bright blonde hair and dewy eyes, Yvette Mimieux fit the bill for young Hollywood of the 1960s. Born in Los Angeles, California, she had a quality that made it look like she had been plucked from the beaches of Malibu — perfect for the rising surf scene of the late-1950s.

She was featured on the cover of LIFE magazine for the first time on May 9, 1960. The feature of the new starlet paints a bright, dreamy portrait of a new actress who loves the beach, horseback riding and dance recitals. “Yvette is warm, friendly, engagingly direct and filled with a wistful love for outdoor places and solitude. Sometimes she feels sad because she was born so late — the pictures she wants to buy are owned by museums, the land she wants to build on has long since been subdivided.”

While in real life, Mimieux did enjoy solitude and the outdoors, she also wasn’t just a pretty face on screen. Mimieux had a wistful, vulnerable quality about her acting that provided depth to her roles. She also wanted more for her career than the roles she received. Even the notoriously tough film critic Pauline Kael noticed this quality in Mimieux noting that she was “a much better actress than the parts she gets.”

Already a model, Mimieux was discovered while riding horseback in the Hollywood Hills, according to publicist Jim Bryon, who said he spotted her.

Mimieux’s career began as Hollywood was beginning to change. Her first film was Platinum High School (1960). By this time, most Americans had television sets in their homes; making the motion picture industry nervous about drawing film audiences. The studio system was also shifting, with most of Hollywood’s major stars working freelance rather than being tied to a movie studio. 

Her big break came the same year with the sci-fi drama, The Time Machine (1960), adapted from the H. G. Wells novel. Director George Pal cast Mimieux whose option had just been dropped by MGM. Co-starring with Rod Taylor, Mimieux played Weena, a girl living in the future who Taylor falls in love with. Pal said she was a “cross between a little princess and Brigitte Bardot.” 

The success of The Time Machine changed the course of Mimieux’s career. Mimieux was cast in the teen dramedy Where the Boys Are (1960). A sleeper hit, the film follows four college girls traveling from a snowy Midwestern college to sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida for spring break vacation. Mimieux is flanked by costars Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss and Connie Francis in the film based on Glendon Swarthout’s bestselling book. On the surface, Where the Boys Are is a fluffy vacation beach film. But the film is a coming-of-age story as the college co-eds evaluate if all young women should experience premarital sex and the potential consequences that come with that. “Nice girls” of this time period didn’t have sex before marriage. Mimieux plays Melanie Tolman, who wants to have a romance with an Ivy League boy while on vacation. It’s Melanie who suffers consequences, as she mistakes sex for love. Mimieux gives a gut-wrenching performance in this film, going from blissfully naïve to broken and in shock. Where the Boys Are was a surprise hit, according to the autobiography of co-star George Hamilton. During filming, Hamilton thought it would be a cheap, nothing film, but said producer Joe Pasternak “brought home the bacon.” Part of the natural chemistry of the four girls was thanks to director Henry Levin running a “happy set,” according to Dolores Hart’s autobiography. “He felt strongly that if the actors liked each other, it would come across on screen,” Hart wrote.

The success of 1960 ushered Mimieux into a prestige film, Light in the Piazza (1962). Mimieux costars with Academy Award-winning actress, Olivia de Havilland as her daughter, Clara. Based on Elizabeth Spencer’s novella, Clara was kicked in the head by a pony at age 10, and though she is now 26, she still acts as if she’s 10 years old. While on vacation in Florence, Italy with her mother, Clara falls in love with local Fabrizio, played by George Hamilton. Her mother begins to dream that Clara may be able to live a life as a married adult. Hamilton credits Mimieux with helping him get the role, because they knew each other from Where the Boys Are. While New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wasn’t complimentary to the film, he noted that Mimieux played her character with “sunshine radiance and rapturous grace.” 

Mimieux continued to play with top stars like Charlton Heston and George Chakiris, fresh from a recent Academy Award win, in the film Diamond Head (1962). In this racial drama, Mimieux falls in love with a Hawaiian boy, which angers her bigoted older brother, played by Heston. “She was just quiet,” Chakiris said in a 2021 interview. “I think most people are can tend to be quiet when they’re working, because they’re concentrating on what they’re doing.”

Mimieux continued to be cast in major films throughout the 1960s, such as The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) and Toys in the Attic (1963). Her roles changed with the more tumultuous late-1960s. Rather than playing misty ingénues, she was cast in adventurous dramas, like The Reward (1965) and Dark of the Sun (1968). Dark of the Sun paired Mimieux again with her early co-star, Rod Taylor.

She also starred in off-beat 1960s films like Three in the Attic (1968), where Mimieux discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her, traps him in the attic and punishes him with sex. In The Picasso Summer (1969), Mimieux plays the bored wife of architect Albert Finney. For inspiration and freedom, the two travel across Europe in search of Pablo Picasso. 

Mimieux was disillusioned with Hollywood, the roles written for women and those she was cast in. She refused to appear nude in a film, and the scripts she was offered frequently included nude scenes. “There’s nothing to play. They’re either sex objects or vanilla pudding,” she said.

Roger Ebert agreed with Mimieux. “Miss Mimieux is better than I imagined she could be; she gets stuck in a lot of hopeless roles,” Ebert wrote in his review of Three in the Attic.

She tried her hand at writing her own roles. Mimieux wrote and starred in the television movies, Hit Lady (1974) and Obsessive Love (1984).

Mimieux turned to television for better roles in the 1970s. She starred on the short-lived TV series The Most Deadly Game (1970-71) costarring George Maharis and Ralph Bellamy.

Her last role was in the TV movie Lady Boss (1992) based on a Jackie Collins book.

Rushed into stardom at age 18, Mimieux went to great lengths to keep her privacy. “The real Yvette tries to keep part of her life to herself,” said the May 9, 1960, LIFE magazine profile on Mimieux. 

“I didn’t want to have a totally public life,” she said in a 1979 Washington Post interview. “When the fan magazines started wanting to take pictures of me making sandwiches for my husband, I said no.”

She went on to say she felt living your private life in public takes something away from relationships and cheapens them. In a 1962 interview with Earl Wilson, Mimieux said perhaps film’s biggest stars would have found more happiness if their private lives hadn’t been spread by the tabloids. In fact, at the start of her film career, Mimieux was married and kept it a secret from the press for two years before the Associated Press caught wind. “One of her most successful efforts in maintaining her professional image, which no doubt has some relation to her personal image, is the control of her press relations,” said the 1963 Vol 1. issue of Cinema magazine. 

Outside of acting, Mimieux studied archeology at UCLA. She traveled on archeological expeditions to Indonesia and other areas, often writing about the experiences.

Today, Mimieux is remembered best for her early, sun kissed film roles. But with her fierce attitude towards her career, personal life and the way women were represented on screen, she won’t be remembered as just “warmly wistful” or “vanilla pudding.”