She was a scream queen before the phrase was even coined. Hazel Court, who starred in such Hammer films as The Raven with Peter Lorre, Vincent Price and Boris Karloff, died of a heart attack near Lake Tahoe yesterday. Court paired with Price a second time to scream yet again in another Poe adaptation, The Masque of the Red Death. It may have been her finest horror performance due to its striking visuals, Satanic plot, a strange dwarf and Court's fine performance.

The flame-haired British actress first came to the United States to star in the lauded Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series and soon became a sought after character actress beyond the horror genre. Perhaps Hazel Court's greatest so-bad-it's-good movie is Devil Girl from Mars in which she plays a dominatrix-like female alien with a robot slave/sidekick. Court passed just before her autobiography, Hazel Court Horror Queen, was to be released in early June. The actress, who also starred in The Twilight Zone TV series, had a second career as an internationally known sculptor and artist when she stopped working in film.

But she'll always be remembered for those Hammer films. You can see her work as a bemused and frightened nurse, albeit screamless, in the macabre Dr. Blood's Coffin, via a YouTube clip.