Winning (Online) Friends (and rare photos)

Many thanks to an online admirer and friend of Cafe Drake who located us through a Word Press search for Barbara Steele. Running his own marvelous website dedicated to the greatest of cult actresses, Kurt Steller sent the stellar photo above from a 1965 press book to us via email, noting our love of both Babs and kitties! Visit his site here, and as always, say Cafe Drake sent you.

Critic Raymond Durgnat once declared that Steele’s very eyelids snarl, and the late Italian director Riccardo Freda, who worked with her twice, rhapsodized that “in certain conditions of light and color…her face assumes a cast that doesn’t appear to be quite human.” Only in horror films, of course, is that something about which to rhapsodize.And so Steele, an actress of formidable intelligence, talent, beauty and high-minded (if sometimes eccentric) standards became a not a star, not a beloved character actress or a household name (except, of course, in a few select households), but a cult icon. She is the sadomasochistic Madonna of the “cinefantastique”; the queen of the wild, the beautiful and the damned; and to her fans - let’s call them “Steelers” - the one and only true Mother of Darkness.

Unlike many lesser horror figures, Steele never reveled in her cult status. For years she fought it aggressively, refusing genre-oriented interviews and shunning the fan-boy circuit. More recently, she’s started making occasional convention appearances; sometimes she’s aloof and distant, other times she’s as nice and accessible as can be. Her devoted fans take her however they can get her, clutch their signed photographs and write worshipful encomiums such as this. Steele’s assessment of her enduring allure is as cool and astute as you would expect: “It’s not me they’re seeing. They’re casting some projection of themselves, some aspect that I somehow symbolize. It can’t possibly be me.”

-Maitland McDonagh, Alliance of Women Film Journalists