Suzan Farmer

Suzan Maxine Farmer (16 June 1942 – 17 September 2017) was an English film and television actress. She was regularly cast in movies produced by Hammer Films. Early life The daughter of David Farmer, a trader in metals, and Eleanor (née Best), she was born in Maidstone, Kent, although the family later moved to Bray in Berkshire, near the location of Bray Studios, later used by Hammer. Her younger brother is the city financier Michael Farmer, now a Conservative life peer. Both of their parents were alcoholics, as her brother related in his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 2014, and the two children "experienced the poverty, neglect and shame that are such potent drivers of social exclusion". David Farmer's company was liquidated and he died before his elder child was seven. Suzan Farmer trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Career Suzan Farmer had lead roles in several Hammer swashbuckling and horror films of the 1960s. The first of these was The Scarlet Blade (US: The Crimson Blade, 1963), an English Civil War tale with Lionel Jeffries and Oliver Reed, while The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), concerned a ship allied with the Spanish Armada and was the first of her three films with Christopher Lee in the lead. Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966) were made back-to back using the same sets and an overlapping cast. In the Dracula film, she was targeted by Lee's vampire, but fought him off sending him to a cold, watery end assisted by Francis Matthews, who played her husband, and also her brother in Rasputin. Another of her horror film roles, this time for a company other than Hammer, was as support in Die, Monster, Die! (aka, Monster of Terror, 1965), starring Boris Karloff as her character's father, but she found Karloff himself rather distant. The thriller Persecution (1974), with Ralph Bates as her husband, was a failure both critically and at the box-office. Other films include the war drama 633 Squadron (1964) as an RAF driver, plus the comedy Doctor in Clover (1966).