Kathleen Hughes, star of It Came From Outer Space, has died aged 96. As well as playing the ‘bad girl’ in cult movies and appearing on numerous TV shows, she was married to River of No Return producer Stanley Rubin for sixty years, and befriended many stars from Hollywood’s golden age, including Marilyn Monroe.

She was born Elizabeth von Arken (or ‘Betty’) in Los Angeles in 1928. “When I was a little girl, my mother used to read to me all these lovely fairy stories about an ugly duckling,” she told Stephanie Nolasco in a 2019 Fox News interview. “I had buck teeth. I was very tall. I just felt ugly. I guess I did finally turn into a swan.”

Her uncle – playwright and screenwriter F. Hugh Herbert – told her she was too tall to be a leading lady. But while performing in a college production of Maxwell Anderson’s Night Over Taos, she was approached by a talent scout from Twentieth Century-Fox.

Happy to be proved wrong, her uncle – who was also under contract at Fox – arranged a screen test, and she was given a seven-year contract. As the studio gave her a glamorous makeover (including a new name), another young starlet – Norma Jeane Dougherty, aka Marilyn Monroe – was quietly dropped.

In 1947, Marilyn had played a small part in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!, written and directed by Kathleen’s uncle, and her cousin Diana Herbert had met a nervous Marilyn on the set. The film’s release was delayed until 1948, after Marilyn left Fox.

Kathleen glimpsed Marilyn’s potential in March 1948, when the 21-year-old – who had recently been signed to Columbia Pictures – returned to Fox and joined Diana in a stage show, Strictly for Kicks, at the Studio Club Little Theatre, as Kathleen recalled in a 2004 interview for the Film Talk website.

My cousin took acting lessons when I was already under contract at Fox, and she appeared in a show at the studio club. You see, in those days, every studio had a studio club for all the people who worked behind the scenes—the secretaries, the errand boys, the people who worked in the mailroom, etc.—meaning everybody but the actors. And every year, they’d put on a show, and Diana would be in one of those shows. The day before the show, she said, ‘They took my song number away from me, and they gave it to a girl named Marilyn Monroe … they had just dropped her, and now they’re giving her the song. I’m still in the show, so why don’t you come and see me?’ So I went to the show to see Diana and her number. She was very good. But then Marilyn came on, and she was so fantastic and looked like a star. I couldn’t believe they had dropped her. Her song was ‘I Never Took a Lesson in My Life.’ I thought, ‘If anyone at the studio would see the show, they’d realise they made a terrible mistake, and they would sign her right back.’

Kathleen’s first, uncredited role was in Jean Negulesco’s Road House (1948), a well-regarded film noir starring Ida Lupino – and like Marilyn’s debut, her part was mostly cut. She tested for the female lead in Yellow Sun, a Western starring Gregory Peck, but the role went to Anne Baxter. She also gave another young hopeful, Rock Hudson, his first screen kiss in a test. “I didn’t think he was a Greek god or anything,” she admitted. “After it was over, I never said to myself that he is going to be a big star.”

In 1949, she played co-eds in Mother Is a Freshman, Mr. Belvedere Goes to College, and It Happens Every Spring. After a bit part in another noir classic, Where the Sidewalk Ends, she tried out for the comedy Western, A Ticket to Tomahawk – but lost to Marilyn, who would soon sign a new, seven-year contract with the studio that had once rejected her.

The casting office called me, and they asked, ‘Can you dance?’ They suggested I work with this poor, patient dance director. He tried for hours to teach me one simple step. At the end of the day, he said, ‘Forget it, we will get someone else.’ That someone else was Marilyn, and that’s how she got a small part in A Ticket to Tomahawk and I didn’t. But she deserved it much more than I did; I was a terrible dancer. Years later, I was able to pick up that particular step, but I couldn’t learn it at the time. But Marilyn’s other films that same year were The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve; they launched her career.

After another co-ed role in Take Good Care of My Little Girl, and more bit parts – including several musicals, alongside ‘Fox blondes’ Betty Grable and June Haver – the studio dropped her. She was soon taken up by Universal Pictures, and went blonde herself in 1952’s For Men Only (aka The Tall Lie), a campus drama starring Paul Henreid of Casablanca fame, who also directed.

The sex appeal Kathleen brought to For Men Only led to numerous pin-ups showing off her long legs, and she was named Miss Cheesecake of 1952 by US Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, a title previously held by Marilyn. She returned to lighter fare with Sally and Saint Anne, before winning the part which would define her career.

A producer at Universal asked if she could test their 3D cameras by catwalking on a runway in a bathing suit. When she asked what the project was, he told her that Barbara Rush had already been cast as the female lead in It Came From Outer Space (1953.) Kathleen then pushed to play Jane, girlfriend of George (Russell Johnson), a telephone lineman who is attacked by aliens after learning that messages were being intercepted by a spacecraft in the Arizona desert.

“I had to beg for that part,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You just did a lead. You can’t do such a small part.’ I said, ‘How can it be small? It’s in 3D. You’ve got to give it to me.’” In a memorable scene, she bursts into a police station to report her fiancé missing. “The thing about working in 3D is you have to know that anything that is sticking out towards the camera was going to come out into the audience,” she explained. “I walk into the scene wearing this tight blouse. I enjoy the audience reaction when I come on screen. It’s a big kick.”

However, it wasn’t her walk-on role that made history. “I had just finished working,” she said. “I went to the still gallery, and as I walked in, the cameraman said to me, ‘Put your hands up in the air and scream.’ And I did. It was an instant success.” The other actors struck similar poses, but it was Kathleen’s image that became iconic.

A raven-haired Kathleen served as handmaiden to Piper Laurie in The Golden Blade, a Technicolor swashbuckler based on a tale from The Arabian Nights. Five years after their screen kiss, leading man Rock Hudson was now Universal’s biggest star – and they posed together on the studio lot with Kathleen holding a banner that read: ‘I LIKE ROCK.’

After playing second fiddle to Cleo Moore in another costume drama, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Kathleen reunited with Outer Space director Jack Arnold for Universal’s next 3D movie, The Glass Web. However, previews showed that audiences preferred it in 2D, and the 3D version was rarely seen until both versions were released on Blu-Ray in 2025.

In this murder mystery, Kathleen played Paula, a scheming actress who blackmails Don (John Forsythe), a married TV writer with whom she had a brief affair, and then seduces his lonely researcher, Henry (Edward G. Robinson), who turns against her after realising she is using him to get ahead – and Paula’s grisly fate provides material for their show, Crime of the Week.

Kathleen later said Robinson was the best actor she had worked with. A promotional blurb described Paula as ‘bad, beautiful and bold as sin … and born to be murdered!’ In an otherwise sniffy review, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther noted she was ‘a dainty dish of poison,’ while Variety added, ‘ Kathleen Hughes turns on the obvious s.a. for her hard-boiled role and brings it off neatly.’

In late 1953, Kathleen went on her first date with screenwriter turned producer Stanley Rubin (The Narrow Margin, Macao), who at thirty-six was eleven years her senior. He took her to see the ‘answer print’ (or rough cut) of the film he was currently producing: River of No Return, a Western with Marilyn Monroe. While Kathleen was Universal’s ‘3D Girl,’ Fox had developed a new wide-screen process, and River was one of the first CinemaScope movies. Rory Calhoun, who played Marilyn’s gambler husband, had a similar part in Kathleen’s next movie.

“I was in New York when I got a call from Universal, saying, ‘Come back immediately. You’re going to be right away into a picture called Dawn at Socorro,‘” she remembered. “So I said, ‘Wonderful! I pack my bags and I get right back.’ The same day, I got a call from Sam Spiegel’s office; he wanted to test me for the Eva Marie Saint part in On the Waterfront. I said, ‘I can’t, I have to go back to Universal to do a picture.’ If I could have at least auditioned for it …”

Stanley and Kathleen were married in 1954, and would raise four children together (Chris, Angie, John and Michael.) “We were just good for each other,” Kathleen reflected. “And I was determined not to get married until I found someone I would be happy to live with forever. So I made every effort to be a good wife. It was a very, very happy marriage.”

Their honeymoon was brief, as Kathleen was beginning a 3-month run in The Seven Year Itch at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. A screen adaptation of George Axelrod’s Broadway hit was in the works at Fox, with Marilyn Monroe in the same role that Kathleen played onstage. A photograph from the production shows her wearing a sleeveless white blouse and shorts, similar to an outfit designed for Monroe. However, what was acceptable in the theatre was too revealing for the screen, and Marilyn’s costume was nixed.

In the film’s most famous scene, Marilyn and co-star Tom Ewell leave a New York cinema after seeing Jack Arnold’s latest 3D movie, Creature From the Black Lagoon. In the heat of the night, Marilyn stands over a subway grate and her dress blows up in the breeze. The sequence that was later heavily edited, but a slew of images captured by reporters on the street became iconic, rather like Kathleen’s still photo for It Came From Outer Space.

RKO boss Howard Hughes wanted Kathleen to test for a supporting role in Underwater! (1955), an adventure movie starring Jane Russell. “He was such a strange man,” she recalled. “When he wanted to see any of us, we all had to go to the same photographer and we had to wear a specific dress. We were photographed from every angle … I was wearing knee-high stockings because the dress covered them. I was sitting with my legs crossed, and Howard never looked me in the eye. He was staring the whole time at the stockings … Well, they ended up with someone totally different from me, Lori Nelson, who was also under contract to Universal.”

In the same year she ended her studio contract with Cult of the Cobra, one of Universal’s many ‘monster movies’, opposite Hughes protegée Faith Domergue. Kathleen’s first independent film was Three Bad Sisters (1956.) “I just loved the scene where I horse-whipped my sister and sent her sobbing and bleeding into the night where she got into a car and drove off a cliff,” she said. “For some reason, it just struck me that it’s very funny. I don’t know why. But it was fun to do a part like that where you’re whipping somebody. It’s something where I could never manage myself doing. Actually, I was whipping a pillow …”

By 1956, as the Rubins built a family home in the Hollywood Hills, Kathleen’s film career was dwindling and she increasingly focused on television work. Her last big-screen role for several years was in Unwed Mother (1958), directed by Walter Doniger, best-known for TV’s Peyton Place.

During the late 1950s she appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and 77 Sunset Strip; and in the 1960s, she guested on Perry Mason, I Dream of Jeannie, and Mission: Impossible. Following bit parts in two films produced by her husband, Promise Her Anything (1966), and The President’s Analyst (1967), she had a regular role in his TV series, Bracken’s World.

The 1970s saw Kathleen on Here’s Lucy, M*A*S*H, Barnaby Jones, and Quincy M.E. She later filmed a scene for Ironweed, the 1987 movie starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, but it was cut. She played a nun in Tony Scott’s Revenge (1990), with Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn. And in 1998, she and her cousin Diana both appeared in Welcome to Hollywood, co-written and directed by her nephew, Tony Markes.

Kathleen, Stanley and Diana were much-loved guests at the annual services hosted by the Marilyn Remembered fan-club at Westwood Memorial Park. “Life was a lot more fun when my husband was alive and when I was working a lot,” Kathleen said after Stanley’s death in 2014. “But I’m still active. I have a personal trainer … I have lots of movie screenings at my house and I’m invited to lots of screenings as well.”

Her final acting role was in a short film, Swamp Women Kissing Booth (2018.) She also appeared in documentaries such as Stanley Rubin: A Work in Progress (2008), Dream Girl: The Making of Marilyn Monroe (2022), and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed (2023.)

Diana Herbert passed away in 2023, and the Rubin home was sold for $5.3 million. An estate sale featured numerous items from Kathleen and Stanley’s careers, including memorabilia for It Came From Outer Space and River of No Return.

Kathleen Hughes died on May 19, 2025, and is survived by three of her four children.