Background
Her mother was Australian, the daughter of an actor.
Her mother was Australian, the daughter of an actor.
She was a widely known Hollywood celebrity during the 1950s, owing much to publicity about her social life. She is best known for her supporting role as photographic model Marla Rakubian in Rudolph Maté"s 1949 film noir Doctorate.O.A. Luez was the second of three children born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Frank and Francesca Luiz, vaudeville singers and dancers who performed traditional Hawaiian and Spanish music
Luez"s father was Hawaiian with some Portuguese ancestry. Luez first showed up on stage doing a hula dance at age three.
In July 1935 the family left Honolulu on the Steamship Mariposa to settle in Los Los Angeles
That same year, six-year-old Loretta performed for Sultan Ibrahim of Johor, who was known as one of the wealthiest men in the world at that time. In 1944 she was cast as a fetching Javanese girl in The Story of Doctor Wassell. In October 1944, she was featured in Esquire.
She signed a five-year contract with 20th Century-Fox in 1945, for a weekly salary of $125.
In the late 1940s, she became a highly successful model, appearing in photographs and artwork for national brands such as Lux soap. In 1949, when she was 21, she played Marla Rakubian in the film noir Doctorate.O.A. In 1950, Luez became widely known for supporting roles with Roddy McDowell in Killer Shark, and Kim with Errol Flynn, which was the first major motion picture filmed in India.
About working with Flynn, Luez said "Errol and I play our love scenes through the window and do not kiss. But we took stills embracing each other.
They asked me if I enjoyed working that way with Errol and I told them it was very, very disturbing, to say the least." From that time forward she was cast mostly in exotic, sexy character roles in films and television
In 1953, she appeared in Siren of Bagdad as a dancing slave girl. The following year, she played a small role in the Bowery Boys film, Jungle Gents, opposite Huntz Hall"s character "Sach" (her one line was "Kiss, kiss, kiss"). In 1956, she appeared in another exotic slave-girl role as Karamaneh in the syndicated television series, The Adventures of Doctor Fu Manchu.
Her last major film cr was in 1963 when she played a cantina girl, Felina, in Ballad of a Gunfighter with Marty Robbins, drawn from his 1959 hit song "El Paso." Luez left the film industry in 1965.
Laurette Luez died on September 12, 1999 in Milton, Florida, aged 71, from undisclosed causes.
