Actress found dead in producer’s mansion got a taste of Hollywood

LANA CLARKSON, the actress found shot dead at music legend Phil Spector’s ten-bedroom castle in Los Angeles, was well-known to B-movie fans.

Born in 1966 in California, Clarkson set her heart on making it in the tough world of Hollywood.

After appearing in numerous American TV shows, including Knight Rider in 1982 and The A-Team a year later, she starred in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Amy Heckerling's 1982 film about sex, sun and Californian shopping malls.

She then graced the screen, if only briefly, with Al Pacino when she popped up as a dancer at the Babylon Club in Brain De Palma's Scarface (1983).

During the mid-1980s she appeared in several sword and sorcery pictures such as Deathstalker (1984) and Barbarian Queen (1985), and also played Rachel in Nico Mastorakis's average 1984 thriller, Blind Date.

It was her association with legendary producer Roger Corman that really put her on the B-movie map.

She described learning about the movie world under Corman as the "boot camp" of film-making.

Clarkson's first starring role was in the sci-fi movie Barbarian Queen, produced by Corman. The film, set in the Roman Empire, saw Clarkson play one of only three women to survive a village attack who decide to exact revenge. The spoof Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) and fantasy Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II (1988) both followed before Clarkson had her first taste of horror in Jim Wynorski's The Haunting of Morella (1990).

Two years later she returned to the sword and sorcery genre as Princess Athalia in Joe Finley's Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back.

In 1996 she starred as Detective Jan Cooper in Richard Gabai's Vice Girls.

In 1997 she popped up in the background at a fashion show in Love in Paris (1997), or Another Nine and A Half Weeks, as it was called on video.

She also worked as a stunt woman that year in the movie Retroactive. Her most recent film credit was in 2001 as Dr Ellen Taylor in March, a film about an insurance salesman trying to save his marriage.

Her film career after that petered out somewhat with just small roles in a handful of films. But she kept the money coming in by appearing in numerous advertising campaigns, including Nike, Mercedes and US retail chain Kmart.

Clarkson was a huge fan of screen icon Marilyn Monroe and collected memorabilia about her.

She was also a regular volunteer at the AIDS charity Project Angel Food, which delivers food to those disabled by HIV or AIDS.