Luana Anders

Versatile performer Luana Anders kindled two significant partnerships while studying acting in the 1950s. The first was with schlocky genre director Roger Corman, who cast Anders as the sister of iconic horror antagonist Vincent Price in his big-screen adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's macabre masterwork "The Pit and the Pendulum." Corman also introduced her to would-be auteur Francis Ford Coppola, with whom she worked on his cheapo 1963 thriller "Dementia 13," playing a scheming widow. In 1993, Anders adopted the pseudonym Margo Blue to pen the screenplay for "Fire on the Amazon," a Corman-produced B-movie notable for featuring a young Sandra Bullock. It was during that same '50s acting class where she met Corman that Anders befriended legendary actor Jack Nicholson. Besides being personal friends, the two collaborated frequently on projects, both appearing in the drifter bible "Easy Rider," with Anders as a skinny-dipping hippie, and in the salty naval comedy "The Last Detail," in which she played a similarly free-spirited party girl. Anders also appeared in small roles in two of Nicholson's four directorial efforts-the Western comedy "Goin' South" and "The Two Jakes," a follow-up to Roman Polanski's Nicholson-led noir, "Chinatown." Anders died in 1996, and Nicholson honored their friendship during his Best Actor acceptance speech for "As Good as It Gets" two years later.