Born Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins on May 14, 1926, Liz Renay died January 22, 2007, at the age of 80 in Las Vegas, Nevada, of cardiopulmonary arrest.

   Quoting liberally from her biography at www.imdb.com, it is clear that there is no immediate connection between Ms. Renay and crime fiction:

    “Liz Renay’s extraordinary life could almost be a movie script. Raised by fanatical religious parents, she ran away from home to win a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest, and become a showgirl during the war. She eventually became a gangster’s [Mickey Cohen’s] moll, and when he was arrested she refused to co-operate with the authorities and was sentenced to three years in Terminal Island prison, where she wrote her autobiography. On release she became a stripper, and self-publicist, performing the first mother and daughter strip and the first grandmother to streak down Hollywood Boulevard.”

Liz Renay

   However, and a big one at that, Ms. Renay did appear in a few films that do warrant mention here, the first being an obscure classic of late 1950s film noir, Date with Death, 1959, starring Gerald Mohr.

   A semi-anonymous reviewer on IMDB says great things about the movie, from which I have excerpted the following:

    “This also is one of the few REAL lead dramatic roles I’ve ever seen Liz Renay in, and she is fantastic. She often was used in smaller roles for name value, but here she is the female lead, and she is seductive, charming, warm, and everything a b-crime-movie leading lady needs to be…. As for Gerald Mohr, I’ve always considered him one of the great hard-boiled leading men, both on radio (where he played Phillip Marlowe) and in film. Here he is both tough and sympathetic, yet initially mysterious. He brings much depth to a role that many would have just walked through. For the fan of low-budget 1950s crime films … DATE WITH DEATH should be a must-see. With a fine jazz score, great location photography, an exciting plot, and some genuinely surprising twists and turns, DATE WITH DEATH does not need any subliminal gimmicks to be a model b-crime film. I give it ten stars out of ten.”

Date with Death

   Go here for the rest of Mr. Renay’s onscreen credits, which appear largely to be schlocky B-movies or (far) less, but which also include a part on the television series Adam-12, and a role as a stripper in Peeper (1975), based on Keith Laumer’s novel Deadfall, later titled Fat Chance, in which Michael Caine plays a London PI in LA by the name of Leslie C. Tucker. Natalie Wood plays the femme fatale.