Inger Stevens

A 1952 graduate of Manhattan (KS) High School, she is being inducted into the MHS Hall of Fame, along with classmate Del Close (January 2007).

First husband, Tony Soglio, was also her first agent. They married in 1955 but separated after only six months. Since there was no community property, he was given 5% of her earnings for the next seven years upon their 1958 divorce.

Was romantically involved with Bing Crosby during and after they appeared together in Man on Fire (1957). The relationship never led to marriage because Stevens refused to convert to Catholicism. When Crosby married Kathryn Grant, who had converted a year or two later, Stevens was devastated.

She cheated death three times. In her first suicide attempt, she swallowed sleeping pills and ammonia which left her with blood clots in her lungs, legs swelled up to twice their size, and temporary blindness (she miraculously recovered within weeks); one time, she and Rod Steiger were nearly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes while filming a scene from Cry Terror! (1958) in a tunnel (Steiger said years later she initially refused medical treatment at the scene, she said she wanted to die); and once she leaped from a crash-landing jet liner minutes before it exploded.

SPOILER: One of her best remembered TV roles was on an episode of "The Twilight Zone" (1959) in which she played a frantic lady driver who kept passing the same hitchhiker on the road ("Going my way?"). The audience later finds out the phantom actually represented Death and that she had been killed in a car accident all along.

Was in the running but lost out on the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) to Audrey Hepburn.

Following her suicide from acute barbiturate poisoning, it was revealed that Inger had been long married (from 1961) to African-American bit actor Ike Jones. The marriage, for obvious reasons, was kept under wraps to protect her career. They were estranged at the time she died.

Replaced Barbara Bel Geddes on Broadway in "Mary, Mary" in 1962.

When she died in 1970, she left an estate estimated at $162,000.