Virginia Leith

Virginia Leith was an American actress.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Leith worked as a hatcheck girl and drive-in waitress before becoming a model.

Leith met director Stanley Kubrick when he was a photographer and shot her for the cover of Look magazine. When Kubrick made the transition to filmmaking, he cast her in his first feature film, 1953’s Fear and Desire as a “half-animal” peasant girl captured and eventually killed by a soldier (played by Paul Mazursky). Kubrick later disavowed the film and was said to have destroyed the original negative.

She also appeared in Black Widow (with Ginger Rogers), White Feather (with Jeffrey Hunter), Violent Saturday (with Victor Mature), On the Threshold of Space (with Guy Madison), Toward the Unknown (with William Holden), and A Kiss Before Dying (with Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward).

Leith’s best-known film role was in the 1962 low-budget science fiction cult classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, in which she played the disembodied head of the main character’s fiancee, which he keeps alive after discovering how to keep human body parts from dying.

Leith retired from acting in the early 1960s, but returned in the late 1970s to work in several popular television series, including Baretta, Starsky and Hutch, Barnaby Jones, Police Woman, and The White Shadow.

Leith died November 4, 2019, in Palm Springs, California. She was 94.