Maila Nurmi

Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi (December 11, 1922 – January 10, 2008), known professionally as Maila Nurmi, was an American actress who created the campy 1950s character Vampira. She was raised in Astoria, Oregon, where she worked in tuna and salmon canneries. She relocated to Los Angeles in 1940, with hopes of becoming an actress. After several minor film roles, she found success with her Vampira character, television's first horror host. Nurmi hosted her own series, The Vampira Show, from 1954 to 1955, on KABC-TV. After the show's cancellation, she appeared in the 1959 cult film Plan 9 from Outer Space, directed by Ed Wood. She is also billed as Vampira, despite not playing the character, in the 1959 films The Beat Generation, where she plays a beatnik poet, and crime film The Big Operator. She was portrayed by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic, Ed Wood. Early life Maila Nurmi was born to Onni Niemi (earlier Syrjäniemi), a Finnish immigrant, and Sophia Peterson, an American of Finnish descent. Her place of birth was at one time disputed: According to biographer W. Scott Poole in Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror (2014), she was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. During her career, she claimed to have been born in Petsamo, Finland, claiming she was the niece of Finnish athlete Paavo Nurmi, who began setting long-distance running world records in 1921, the year before her birth. Public U.S. immigration records show her father's immigration at Ellis Island in 1910. Additionally, Dana Gould claimed in a 2014 public interview that he had seen Nurmi's birth certificate, which listed her birthplace as Gloucester, Massachusetts. In her personal diary, Nurmi admitted the Petsamo story was fiction.