According to The Hollywood Reporter, Dana Wynter (Dagmar Winter), star of 1956’s SF classic INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. She was 79.
Playing Becky Driscoll, the old flame and tentative love interest of Kevin McCarthy’s haunted Dr. Miles Bennell in the horror-tinged science fiction parable of paranoia, gave the actress a special place in the hearts of genre fans.
The Don Siegel film of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers became a favorite, open to viewers interpetation. One could claim it as a a cautionary tale about those insidoust Communist infiltators or a waring against McCarthyism. Many simply see it as a symblol of a changing America, of increasing alienation from ones’ friends and neighbors, the bleak underside of 1950’s conformity.
Anyone who seemed to mindlessly echo the dictates of others, or who showed a dramatic change in attitudes might be labled as a “Pod Person”, a souless alien substitute for someone you once knew.
(There is a sad real-life version of this called the Capgras delusion; a psychiatric disorder in which sufferers believe that family members or friends have been replaced by indetical duplicates.)
The German-born, South African-raised Dana Wynter was entirely believable as the American-as-apple pie Becky, and equally convincing playing European aristocrars, as she often would in film and television roles.
Other genre and bordline roles include KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE, TV’s SUSPENSE, COL. MARCH OF SCOTLAND YARD (1956, with Boris Karloff), costarred with Robert Lansing (THE 4-D MAN) in THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS TV series, THE WILD WILD WEST, FANTASY ISLAND, and THE QUESTOR TAPES.