LIFE’s Paul Schutzer had trailed Christie, then just 25 years old, as she filmed her next high-profile film: Fahrenheit 451, directed by the French New Wave auteur François Truffaut. (For unknown reasons, the shot that editors selected for the April 29, 1966, cover was not by Schutzer, after all, but by Iranian photographer Hatami.)

Making the adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel was a huge undertaking for both the British actress and her French director: Christie was pulling double duty, cast in both the lead female roles, and Truffaut—who had built his name in 1959 with the seminal Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)—was taking a risk helming his first English-language film. (It would turn out to be his last.) Still, a sense of calm and respect ruled the set, according to notes filed by Paul Schutzer: “Truffaut seldom approaches her. He uses the formal ‘vous’ to Julie as he does with everyone. Everybody’s aware of his shyness and also aware of his potential warmth. It’s anticipation of this warmth that brings out the best in his team.”

As for Christie’s own work ethic and her attitude toward her craft: “I feel no difference between me acting and not acting,” she told LIFE. “There’s only one Christie. But I know I’m never more myself than when acting, because I put all of myself into it.”

“A mere three years ago,” LIFE wrote of Christie, “she was an unnoticed bit player, and she’s still pinned to a movie contract that calls for wages like those an old-time film goddess paid her second chauffeur. Julie represents a new spectrum of actresses the anti-goddesses but do not confuse her with just any jaunty gamine frugging on the dance floor of a discotheque. On screen, as the 2,700 movie pros who voted her the Oscar know, she burns with a nervous energy that lights up the house.”

At the time of the shoot, Christie was living with her boyfriend of about three years, an artist named Don Bessant. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever want anyone but Don, but marriage it’s like signing your life away,” she told LIFE. By 1967 the couple had split, and Christie was in a relationship with Warren Beatty, who would later remark that she was “the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person” he had ever known.

“For men, I don’t think it’s sexiness in me that appeals to them, but an air of abandonment,” Christie told LIFE. “Men don’t want responsibilities and neither do I.”

Despite her early misgivings about marriage, Christie did eventually marry—in 2008, she and her longtime partner, journalist Duncan Campbell, tied the knot.

“There’s still one important thing for me to do: learn,” Christie told LIFE in 1966. “I’ve got so little control over myself that adrenaline simply flows. I’m awkward, the type who always does things wrong.” But what may have felt wrong to her was all right in the eyes of her peers and critics: She was nominated for a BAFTA Award the British equivalent of an Oscar for her dual performance in Fahrenheit 451, and has been an Academy Award nominee twice in the decades since.

Not all of Paul Schutzer’s photos from 1966 moody gems showing the actress on and off the Fahrenheit 451 set made it to print. Now, LIFE.com brings to light these pictures of the film icon and thinking filmgoer’s sex symbol in her prime.

ulie Christie beside costar Oskar Werner in a scene from Farhenheit 451.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie took direction from Francois Truffaut on the Fahrenheit 451 set in London, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie in hair and makeup, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie with photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Paul Schutzer’s LIFE colleague.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I’m just in love with cinema,” Christie told LIFE. “In the theater no one in the house will forgive you if you break the spell. In cinema you can always go over something wrong—go deeper, dig further, stretch wider.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I love and adore acting, but I hate the trimmings,” she told LIFE—but Christie became a fashion icon anyway, here representing that swinging-’60s look out of London.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I’ve got something of a frustrated quiz kid in me,” Christie confessed to LIFE. “I never read enough. Novels simply don’t interest me. I like history because it’s based on facts.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie on set, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I arranged a fake lunch with the two of them,” LIFE photographer Schutzer wrote in his notes of creating this photo op between the very shy Truffaut (who spoke very little English) and his star Christie.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Though she called it the “greatest place for a holiday,” Christie told LIFE back in ’66 that she had no desire to work in Hollywood: “I feel very strongly European.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The post An ‘Air of Abandonment’: Photos of Julie Christie, 1966 appeared first on LIFE.

Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs made by Bill Ray in 1963 a time in the 25-year-old Wood’s career when she had made the leap from actress to genuine movie star and, more importantly, to formidable Hollywood player. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE, but appear in Ray’s book, My Life in Photography. 

For Ray, the most striking memory of the several weeks that he spent with Wood and her showbiz cohorts is, unsurprisingly, Wood herself or, more specifically, her singular beauty.

“She was divine,” Ray told LIFE.com. “Really. She was divine to look at, and to photograph. She had that wonderful face, a great body, those amazing eyes just a beautiful young woman, and a lot of fun to be around.”

For the Dec. 20, 1963, issue of LIFE that focused wholly on the movies, Ray scored the choice, high-profile feature on Wood, which was the only piece in the issue that was devoted to a single actor or actress. “This was big stuff,” he says today of the assignment. “You know, back then photographers were never part of the meetings where these sort of assignment decisions were made, so to get the call for something of this magnitude I was thrilled.”

Thrilled, but hardly cowed or overawed. After all, by the time the Natalie Wood shoot came his way, Ray was a seasoned professional, having covered JFK, Elvis Presley, John Wayne and other huge names and famous faces. What comes through in many of his photographs is the sense that here was a photographer who genuinely enjoyed his work, while his subject was a strong young woman who had been in the public eye for so long that having her every move documented was hardly anything new.

As LIFE reminded its readers in that special year-end double issue back in 1963, Natalie Wood was about as self-aware and self-confident an actress as one was likely to meet:

Natalie Wood was in a crowd watching a movie being filmed 21 years ago when the director asked her do a bit: drop an ice cream cone and cry. Then and there, 4-year-old Natalie showed she was born to be a star: she wept so convincingly that the movies hired her and ever since they have been thankful for the foresight. . . . [Movies] still cannot get along without the glamor that stars bring. And Natalie, the biggest young star around, now holds Hollywood in her hand. Her latest performance in her 35th film, ‘Love With a Proper Stranger,’ may win her an Oscar. [She did earn an Academy Award nomination for the role, but Patricia Neal took home the Oscar for her work in ‘Hud.’] Natalie has talent which she uses brilliantly, temperament which she can control, and a dark fresh loveliness that glows from the screen. All this earns her a million dollars a year, along with something that means even more to her the power and the glory that stardom brings.

“Natalie Wood,” observed a prominent Hollywood director, … “has a stranglehold on every young leading-lady part in town. If a role calls for a woman between 15 and 30, you automatically think of her.”

This is exactly what Natalie has worked 21 years to get. She has battled producers and top studio heads with unyielding ferocity to win the roles she wants. Today, before she will do a picture, she demands and gets total approval of script, director, leading man, all actors, everybody clear down to make-up and wardrobe people.

One last detail that Bill Ray recalls about his time with Natalie Wood, however, casts something of a pall across his otherwise sunny memories. At some point during those several weeks, he joined Wood and a number of other people on a boat ride to Catalina Island (see slide 16 in the gallery) the same island off the California coast near which Wood would drown in the fall of 1981. When Ray heard about her death, he was stunned: not only because he had always liked her and remembered the time he spent with her with such fondness, but because he had been struck during that boat ride in 1963 by how uncharacteristically out of sorts she seemed.

“It was obvious to me,” Ray told LIFE.com, “that Natalie did not like being out on the water at all. When I heard that she’d drowned, in basically the same place where we’d been all those years before, I wasn’t just sad although that was part of it. I was also very, very surprised.”

Five decades later, the mystery of Natalie Wood’s death endures. Bill Ray’s pictures, meanwhile, shed a clear, poignant light on a time when the star’s already impressive career felt boundless, and her life charmed. The future, it seemed then, was hers for the taking.

—story by Ben Cosgrove 

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood was playing a game. Friends named something, she acted it out. Here is ‘slightly sensuous.'”

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The woman who guided Natalie to stardom was her mother, the Russian-born Mrs. Maria Gurdin (center). Stern and shrewd, she scrutinized scripts, haggled over fees, snd dressed her child in prim clothes when competitors wore sexy ones.

© Bill Ray

Wood played billiards with actor Tony Curtis, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Wood got a piggyback ride from producer Arthur Loew, Jr., who stopped when Paul Newman invited them to go go-cart racing, 1963.

© Bill Ray

Gowned in satin, bathed by spots, fussed over by attendants, Wood glowed with the glamor pf a Hollywood star.

© Bill Ray

Wood, a shrewd businesswoman, enjoyed presiding over her high-powered cabinet.

© Bill Ray

Wood’s big brown-black eyes grew larger with delight seeing costumes sketched by Edith Head for `Sex and the Single Girl’.

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

Natalie Wood, 1963

© Bill Ray

The post Natalie Wood: Portraits of a Legend appeared first on LIFE.

From her earliest days as an actress until late in her career when she had, against her will, been cast in the public eye as Hollywood’s ultimate Sex Goddess, Marilyn posed for LIFE magazine’s photographers. Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery of pictures—none of which ran in the magazine—by LIFE’s Ed Clark, a Tennessean with a profound talent for capturing the essence of people, both famous and obscure. His pictures of Marilyn offer a rare glimpse into the early days of an eventual pop-culture icon’s career, when a young actress was blissfully unaware of what the coming years would bring and was, it seems, just happy to be in “the industry” and getting noticed.

[Buy the LIFE book, Remembering Marilyn]

In a 1999 interview with Digital Journalist, Clark described how, in 1950, he received a call from a friend at 20th Century Fox about “a hot tomato” the studio had just signed: one Marilyn Monroe.

“She was almost unknown then, so I was able to spend a lot of time shooting her,” Clark recalled. After all, it was still early in her career, and she’d only just begun to gain attention: Three months before this shoot, she appeared as a crooked lawyer’s girlfriend in The Asphalt Jungle; two months later, she had a small role as an aspiring starlet in All About Eve.

“We’d go out to Griffith Park [in Los Angeles] and she’d read poetry. I sent several rolls to LIFE in New York, but they wired back, ‘Who the hell is Marilyn Monroe?'” (Three years later, Marilyn appeared on the cover of LIFE in a now-famous Clark photo, posing with her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-star, Jane Russell.)

Why LIFE never published the gold mine of photos seen in this gallery after Marilyn became a bona fide superstar, however, remains a mystery. The only clue: a brief note about the shoot in the LIFE archives, addressed to LIFE’s photo editor, indicating that “this take was over-developed and poorly printed.”

Whatever the reason, one thing remains perfectly clear: at 24 years old, in 1950, Marilyn Monroe was already something special.

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe, 24, in Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1950.

Ed ClarkLife Pictures/Shutterstock

The post Marilyn Monroe: Rare Early Photos, 1950 appeared first on LIFE.

LIFE.com remembers the star of films as varied as Pal Joey, Strawberry Blonde, Orson Welles’s Lady From Shanghai and the 1946 noir classic, Gilda in which she played one of moviedom’s most devastatingly sexy femmes fatale. Hayworth could play comedy, was stellar in dramatic roles and danced well enough that none other than Fred Astaire, with whom she starred in two hits for Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s, asserted that she was as talented a partner as any he’d ever had.

Hayworth’s offscreen life, meanwhile, was frequently tough. She married five times; she struggled with alcoholism; and for the last years of her life she suffered from a disease that was only diagnosed (and given a name) a few years before she died: Alzheimer’s.

For countless Americans of a certain age, however, and for movie fans around the world, Rita Hayworth remains one of those rarest of creatures: a bona fide movie star from a classic era the Hollywood of the 1940s and ’50s that will never come again.

Rita Hayworth on August 11, 1941 LIFE Cover

Bob Landry (LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth, 1945.

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth in Gilda, 1946

Columbia Pictures

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rita Hayworth 1941

Bob Landry (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Rita Hayworth with husband Orson Wells and daughter Rebecca, 1946

Peter Stackpole (LIFE Picture Collection)

The post Rita Hayworth: Hollywood Legend, Pinup Icon appeared first on LIFE.

There’s little question that LIFE recognized Marilyn’s singular, profound appeal from early on in her career, but she only graced LIFE’s cover six times while she was alive. (She appeared on several more covers after her death in August 1962, including later editions after the magazine ceased publishing as a weekly.) Six times is fewer than Dwight Eisenhower, for example, while Liz Taylor holds the record with fourteen appearances on the cover of the premier photographic magazine of the age.

[Buy the LIFE book, Remembering Marilyn]

And yet . . . when one considers that Marilyn’s run of six covers occurred during a span of a mere 10 years, and that had she lived she might well have challenged Taylor’s supremacy, her close connection to the magazine and, by extension, her centrality to the American conversation around fame, celebrity, sex and media in the 20th century is cast in a much clearer, brighter light.

On top of all that, when one recalls that several of her covers are regarded as classics—her debut and a later Halsman, from 1959, of her jumping, glancing back over shoulder; the Ed Clark shot from 1953 featuring Marilyn and Jane Russell in form-fitting red sequined dresses; a Lawrence Schiller shot of a smiling Marilyn by a pool in June 1962, just two months before her death—the notion that Marilyn helped define what LIFE looked and felt like in the 1950s takes on far greater force.

(Speaking of the 1950s, please note what might be the most incongruous clash of word-and-image ever to appear on the cover of LIFE or on the cover of any magazine, for that matter. In the very first image in the gallery, and quite easily overlooked by anyone whose eyes are, understandably, drawn solely to the gorgeous woman gazing out from the April 17, 1952, issue of LIFE, one can read these rather dramatic, if head-scratching, words: THERE IS A CASE FOR INTERPLANETARY SAUCERS.)

In the end, the LIFE covers on which Marilyn appeared—we’re featuring seven here in this gallery, as well as spreads from the articles that accompanied them—are really just reminders of what a true movie star looked like six long decades ago.

LIFE Magazine, April 7, 1952. Marilyn Monroe’s debut on the magazine’s cover, photographed by Philippe Halsman.

Page spreads from the April 7, 1952, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the April 7, 1952, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the April 7, 1952, issue of LIFE Magazine.

LIFE Magazine, May 25, 1953. Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, photographed by Ed Clark.

Page spreads from the May 25, 1953, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the May 25, 1953, issue of LIFE Magazine.

LIFE Magazine, April 20, 1959. Marilyn Monroe photographed by Richard Avedon.

Page spreads from the April 20, 1959, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the April 20, 1959, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the April 20, 1959, issue of LIFE Magazine.

LIFE Magazine, November 9, 1959. Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Philippe Halsman.

Page spreads from the November 9, 1959, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Life Magazine

LIFE Magazine, August 15, 1960. Marilyn Monroe, photographed by John Bryson.

Page spreads from the August 15, 1960, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the August 15, 1960, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the August 15, 1960, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the August 15, 1960, issue of LIFE Magazine.

LIFE Magazine, August 15, 1960. Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Lawrence Schiller.

Page spreads from the June 22, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the June 22, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the June 22, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the June 22, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

LIFE Magazine, August 17, 1962. Marilyn Monroe, photographed by Lawrence Schiller.

Page spreads from the August 17, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the August 17, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the August 17, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

Page spreads from the August 17, 1962, issue of LIFE Magazine.

The post Marilyn Monroe: The LIFE Cover Stories, 1952-1962 appeared first on LIFE.

“Everybody was working on typewriters back then, so it was very noisy,” remembers editor Richard Stolley, who was the L.A. bureau chief at the time. “I’m sitting in my office and suddenly it got quiet. All the typewriters stopped. I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’ So I got up and I walked to the door. And what was happening? Ann-Margret was walking through the newsroom.”

Years later Stolley and Ann-Margret reminisced about that time. “That,” Stolley says of the picture at left, “is what you were wearing when you came in to the bureau.”

“It was a light blue, lambswool sweater,” Ann-Margret recalls, laughing. “That’s the only outfit I had at the time. The only one! Oh, dear.”

In the decades after that first encounter, Stolley served as the top editor of both LIFE and PEOPLE magazines, and that fresh-faced 19-year-old starlet did pretty well, too: Ann-Margret, born Ann-Margret Olsson in Stockholm, became one of Hollywood’s most vivacious stars, her energy and talent lighting up movies as varied as Bye Bye Birdie, Viva Las Vegas and Tommy. Through the years, Stolley and Ann-Margret remained friends.

In 2012 the two discussed these photos made by Grey Villet (“Oh, I loved him,” Ann-Margret says of the late LIFE photographer) for the 1961 LIFE article that introduced Ann-Margret as a hot Hollywood prospect while she auditioned for a role in the film, State Fair. Many of the photos in this gallery were not originally published in LIFE.

A quick excerpt from Stolley and Ann-Margret’s chat in 2012:

STOLLEY: How important was the LIFE story to your career?

ANN-MARGRET: It was incredibly important. I had not done anything. Nobody knew me. I was amazed and shocked. What can I say? My parents were just beaming.

STOLLEY: The opening page on that story had a picture of you pointing, and the headline was “Who, Me? $10,000 a Week!” That was what we predicted would be your salary if you got the role in State Fair. How did you feel about $10,000 a week?

ANN-MARGRET: I had never heard of such money! That’s just sci-fi.

STOLLEY: How old were you when you came over to the States from Sweden?

ANN-MARGRET: Six years old. And it was my mother and I, because daddy had come to America [earlier] looking for work. That was during the war, and he thought it was much too dangerous for mother and I to cross the ocean. So five years later, my mother and I got on a huge ship and came to America. And neither one of us, of course, spoke English.

STOLLEY: There’s an unpublished picture here [the final image in this gallery] which is kind of fascinating. It’s you walking down the dusty back-lot street with a big, long shadow in front of you. The reason I like it is because it’s kind of a precursor, a forecast of the long shadow you were going to cast over Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

ANN-MARGRET: I had no idea at the time. Of anything.

STOLLEY: Nor did Grey, but he took a very prescient photograph. When I say something like that, what’s your reaction looking at this picture?

ANN-MARGRET: I’d never been to Los Angeles. Never. I wanted to be a …. [Trails off and chokes up] I can’t, I’m starting to cry!

STOLLEY: Don’t do that I’m sorry.

ANN-MARGRET: When you guys [at LIFE.com] sent me all these photographs, what a rush. It all came back to me. It’s just . . . I’m so blessed.

Ann-Margret, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with costume designer Don Feld before a screen test, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret dining with actor Peter Brown at Har-Omar restaurant in Hollywood, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret t with actor Peter Brown at Har-Omar restaurant in Hollywood, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret looking over a script with the screen test’s director, Robert Parrish, and the actor who would read opposite her, David Hedison.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret face-to-face with actor David Hedison, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret and David Hedison rehearsing a scene on Fox’s back lot, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with actor David Hedison, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret, Hollywood, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Studio hairdresser Helen Turpin taking care of Ann-Margret for her State Fair audition in 1961. The film’s director wanted Turpin to give her a “kind of wild, Alice in Wonderland look.”

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Outfitted for a screen test, Ann-Margret with costume designer Don Feld, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret studying costume designer Don Feld’s quick sketch of what she’d wear during the second half of her screen test.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret doing the song-and-dance half of her screen test, during which she performed the old jazz standard “Bill Bailey” wearing that memorable combo of lambswool sweater and black leotard.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret during a screen test, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

At some point during the shoot for LIFE, Ann-Margret visited with her mentor, the legendary George Burns, in a prop room of a studio where he kept an office, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

With help from friend Scott Smith on piano, Ann-Margret auditioned for Dick Pierce (far left) and others at RCA Victor Records, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

To fully illustrate the Ann-Margret story for LIFE, Villet traveled to Fox Lake, Illinois, where he photographed the starlet with her loving family. She, her parents, and her aunts and uncles had all immigrated to the United States from Sweden. Her father stands above her at far left, above, and her mother is in the middle of the photo.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with family and friends, Fox Lake, Illinois, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret dancing with her father, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret’s Uncle Roy gave her a playful spanking after she tried to tickle him, 1961. “It’s wonderful,” she said, “that Grey [Villet, the photographer] was there to capture that moment.”

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret with her uncle, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret, Fox Lake, Illinois, 1961

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

In Los Angeles, Ann-Margret practiced her golf stroke in the office of her manager, Pierre Cossette, as her friend Scott Smith (far left) and another acquaintance looked on, 1961.

Grey Villet/TIME & LIFE Pictures

With friends at her manager Pierre Cossette’s house, 1961. From the reporter’s notes: “Whenever these kids get together they perform for one another; that is, they did not stage this hoedown strictly for [photographer Grey] Villet’s benefit.”

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

According to the reporter’s notes, in this photo Ann-Margret was “exploring the back lot alone and doing a few exuberant leaps around the deserted western street.” But the image was so joyful that LIFE used it to illustrate Ann-Margret’s good news, which came after Grey Villet had finished shooting: She’d nailed the screen test and scored a movie contract with Fox.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Ann-Margret on a studio back lot, Hollywood, 1961.

Grey Villet; LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The post I Was in LIFE: Ann-Margret Remembers appeared first on LIFE.