Evelyn Ankers (actress, “The Queen of the Screamers”)

Evelyn Ankers (17 August 1918 – 29 August 1985) was a British actress born in Chile.

She often played variations on the role of the cultured young leading lady in many American horror films during the 1940s, most notably The Wolf Man (1941) aged 23 opposite Lon Chaney Jr., a frequent screen partner.

Known as “The Queen of the Screamers”, she began her stint as a screamer at Universal Pictures with Hold That Ghost (with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, 1941). Her other films include The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942, with Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi), Captive Wild Woman (1943), Son of Dracula (1943), The Mad Ghoul (1943), Jungle Woman (1944, with J. Carrol Naish), Weird Woman (an Inner Sanctum Mystery, 1944), The Invisible Man’s Revenge (with John Carradine, 1944) and The Frozen Ghost (Inner Sanctum Mystery, with Lon Chaney Jr., 1945).

She also appeared in Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942, with Basil Rathbone), The Pearl of Death (1944, another Sherlock Holmes mystery), and fantasy adventure Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949).

Ankers made over fifty films between 1936 and 1950, then retired from movies at the age of 32 to be a housewife, having married leading actor Richard Denning, with whom she had starred in Hold That Ghost). Denning was himself no stranger to monster movies, appearing in Unknown Island, Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Black Scorpion amongst others. Ankers died of ovarian cancer at the age of 67 on 29 August 1985 in Maui, Hawaii.