Claudia Barrett was a very busy actress on television and in B-movies of the 1950s. Alas, she is remembered best today for the one leading role that she would likely wish viewers could forget, as the heroine in Phil Tucker's notorious low-budget sci-fi thriller Robot Monster (1953). Born Imagene Williams in Los Angeles, she grew up in Sherman Oaks and trained at the Pasadena Playhouse during the 1940s. She was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout who signed her up and changed her name to Claudia Barrett, and her screen career began well enough at Warner Bros. with a small, uncredited role in Raoul Walsh's classic thriller White Heat (1949), starring James Cagney. She played small roles in a string of subsequent pictures, and then started freelancing, which resulted in her getting a few larger parts at Republic Pictures during the waning days of the B-studio's production history. It was in 1953 that Barrett was contracted to play the female lead in Phil Tucker's alien invasion fantasy Robot Monster, playing opposite young leading man George Nader as the hero, and George Barrows as "Ro-Man," an invader from outer space (essentially a man in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet). Shot in less than a week, from a script that reads as though it didn't take much longer than that to write, and on a budget of less than $30,000, Robot Monster was a notoriously bad movie in the judgment of nearly all viewers and critics. It ended up becoming a kind of camp classic, grouped with such so-bad-they're-entertaining pictures as Plan 9 From Outer Space, although in the 1960s and early '70s, before such ironic sensibilities took hold on programmers, it was frequently shown as a straight horror/sci-fi film, in the company of perfectly respectable entries in the field such as Kronos and Invisible Invaders.
Robot Monster was also Barrett's next-to-last feature film. She turned to television around this same time and became a downright ubiquitous presence on the small-screen, primarily (though not entirely) in westerns. She could be seen in episodes of The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Wild Bill Hickok, and The Roy Rogers Show, as well as the later wave of somewhat more mature oaters such as Death Valley Days, Tales of Wells Fargo, Shotgun Slade, and Trackdown. Her most accessible television work, however, was in a pair of episodes of The Abbott & Costello Show, which were seen in syndication for close to 30 years and have been reissued twice on DVD, as well as VHS. Barrett gave up acting in the early '60s and subsequently went to work for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has busied herself as a successful artist since the 1980s. As most of the 1950s Republic library has disappeared from distribution, and her work as Warner Bros. was confined to small roles, Barrett's most widely seen role in the twenty-first century remains that of Alice, the petulant, headstrong heroine in Robot Monster.
