Judy Bamber on AllMovie

Judy Bamber was one of a bevy of buxom, blonde-haired actresses to make the trip to Hollywood in the wake of Marilyn Monroe's rise to fame in the early '50s. Born in Ann Arbor, MI, she became interested in modeling as a teenager in high school, as a motivation to lose weight and improve her posture. By the time she entered Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn she was already making money as a fur model for a local manufacturer and later worked for department stores modeling hats and gloves. After moving to Detroit, she began making appearances on local television, even making it onto The Soupy Sales Show, and she met Frank Robinson, a television announcer whom she later married. He went to Hollywood to produce a movie, but the couple didn't find much success in either of their chosen careers for a long time. Robinson ended up hawking Vega-Matics and other gimmicky products on latenight television, while Bamber did low-level modeling jobs. Luckily, she had chosen to work a trade show where her photo was taken and reprinted in the Los Angeles Times; one thing led to another and she ended up with an agent. She began studying acting with James Stacy, the young aspiring leading man, who also helped her get a contract at Warner Bros. Alas, unbeknownst to Bamber, her agent had been busy getting her a contract with American International Pictures. Both studios ended up dropping her over the mistake, but she did get a movie out of it, the low-budget thriller Dragstrip Girl, directed by Edward L. Cahn. After this misstep, she went off on a USO tour of Korea and returned to a modeling career. By this time, she was rated a choice pin-up with her impressive physique and started doing a lot of appearances on the covers of the suggestive and overheated men's magazines of the pre-Playboy variety, which were still very common in the late '50s. She occasionally did one-off film roles, appearing in low-budget movies such as Up in Smoke, the Bowery Boys take-off on Damn Yankees, playing a gangster's moll. Her most memorable film role came about when director/producer Roger Corman hired Bamber to work in A Bucket of Blood, one of his trio of horror-comedy satires (the others were Creature From the Haunted Sea and Little Shop of Horrors). She also got an increasing amount of acting work on television throughout the late '50s, including several episodes of Bachelor Father, the comedy series starring her romantic idol John Forsythe, as well as installments of GE Theater, Suspicion, Dobie Gillis, Hawaiian Eye, The Untouchables, Grand Jury, and M-Squad. She appeared in comedy sketches, as well as reading commercial copy, with actor/game show host George Fenneman on the quiz show Anybody Can Play. By this time, she was in considerable demand for commercials and was one of the original Hertz girls. Bamber is probably best remembered on film by horror movie buffs, not just for A Bucket of Blood but also for her final film appearance, as the female lead in Joseph Mascelli's 1964 chiller Monstrosity (aka The Atomic Brain). She kept doing modeling work throughout her busiest years on television; like Mary Tyler Moore and other young actress/models of the period, she appeared on numerous LP covers, her physique adorning the packaging of music that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with her image. She ended her career following the birth of her son.