Juli Reding, who starred in the 1960 Bert I. Gordon horror film Tormented as a spurned woman who haunts the man who let her plunge to her death from a lighthouse balcony, has died. She was 85.
Reding died Sept. 16 in Springfield, Missouri, her family announced.
In Allied Artists’ Tormented, directed and co-written by famed horror maestro Gordon, Reding portrayed Vi Mason, the ex-girlfriend of a jazz musician (Richard Carlson) who’s planning to get married. When he refuses her advances, she threatens to blackmail him and ruin his life, which she manages to do as a ghostly apparition who at one point returns as a severed head.
One of seven children, Reding was born on Nov. 28, 1935, in Quanah, Texas. She graduated from Branson High School in Missouri and attended Southwest Missouri State University before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting.
igned by Warner Bros., she played a cigarette girl in Michael Curtiz’s The Helen Morgan Story (1957), starring Ann Blyth and Paul Newman, then appeared in Cowboy (1958), Darby’s Rangers (1958), Vice Raid (1959), Mission in Morocco (1959), Why Must I Die? (1960) and The Interns (1962).
On television, Reding showed up on episodes of 77 Sunset Strip, Sea Hunt, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Branded, Burke’s Law, Dr. Kildaire and The Big Valley and made her final onscreen appearance in 1987 on Murder, She Wrote. She also hosted her own talk show, Here’s Juli, on KCOP-TV in Los Angeles.
Survivors include her son, Christopher; grandson Christopher; sister Judy; and stepchildren Lynn and Jeffrey.
Her second husband, banker and Los Angeles Music Center co-founder Herbert Hutner, whom she married in 1969, died in 2008 at age 99. He was Zsa Zsa Gabor‘s fourth husband, married to the socialite from 1962-66.
Donations in her memory can be made to Help Give Hope, Harmony House or the Breast Cancer Foundation of the Ozarks.
