Camilla Carr, Actress in Keep My Grave Open and Designing Women, Dies at 83
Camilla Carr, the Texas-born actress who appeared for director S.F. Brownrigg in the low-budget 1970s horror films Don’t Look in the Basement, Poor White Trash Part II and Keep My Grave Open, has died. She was 83. Carr died Wednesday in El Paso, Texas, of complications from Alzheimer’s and a dislocated hip, her son, writer,…
Camilla Carr, the Texas-born actress who appeared for director S.F. Brownrigg in the low-budget 1970s horror films Don’t Look in the Basement, Poor White Trash Part II and Keep My Grave Open, has died. She was 83.
Carr died Wednesday in El Paso, Texas, of complications from Alzheimer’s and a dislocated hip, her son, writer, poet and painter Caley O’Dwyer, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Carr also stood out on CBS’ Designing Women when she portrayed a Sugarbaker client who thinks gay men who contract AIDS are getting what they deserve in the October 1987 episode “They’re Killing All the Right People,” written by series creator Linda Bloodworth Thomason.
Carr played an unhinged patient who kills a nurse in Don’t Look in the Basement (1973) and a devious hillbilly daughter in Poor White Trash Part II (1974) — a drive-in hit also known as Scum of the Earth — before she starred in Keep My Grave Open (1977) as a woman with a murderous split personality (she thinks she’s also her brother).
All three were cult exploitation films from Brownrigg, a producer-director known for his ability to create creepiness with very little money.
Born on Sept. 17, 1942, in Memphis, Texas, Carr attended Kermit (Texas) High School and the University of North Texas. She first met her future husband, Hugh Feagin, when they were actors at Theatre Three in Dallas, and they appeared together in the Texas-shot A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970), starring Fabian as 1930s bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd. (Feagin was in Don’t Look in the Basement and Poor White Trash Part II as well.)
As Mrs. Imogene Salinger on Designing Women, Carr overhears plans for a funeral for a young interior designer (Tony Goldwyn) dying of AIDS and remarks, “As far as I’m concerned, this disease has one thing going for it: It’s killing all the right people.” (Watch the scene here.)
“It was a shitty character, but she did a great job for an important cause,” her son said.
Bloodworth Thomason, whose mother had recently died after getting AIDS through a blood transfusion, earned an Emmy nomination for writing the episode.
Carr also showed up in the Michael Anderson-directed Logan’s Run (1976); played housekeeper/snoop Nellie Maxwell on three episodes of CBS’ Falcon Crest in 1988; appeared on One Day at a Time and Another World; and played Maxine in 1991 in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, one of several productions she did for the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
And in 2015, she came out of retirement to appear in Don’t Look in the Basement 2, directed by S.F. Brownrigg’s son, Anthony Brownrigg.
Carr also wrote on telefilms and authored the comic 1989 novel Topsy Turvy Dingo Dog, which revolved around a B-movie actress, Mary Jane Shady, who returns to her hometown of Uncertain, Texas, for her 20th high school reunion.
Her second husband was Oscar-winning screenwriter Edward Anhalt (Panic in the Streets, Becket). They were married from 1968 until their 1976 divorce, and she was one of his five wives.
