Kitty Swan

Kitty Swan with Richard Carlson in DEADLIER THAN THE MALE.

Nationality:
Birth:
Death:
Aka: Kirston Svanholm

Just who the hell was Kitty Swan? The simple answer to this, as far as I'm concerned anyway, is that I simply don't know. As her real name was Kirston Svanholm, I'm guessing she was Danish or Swedish. Was she a model? Very likely. Was she in Eurocult films? Most certainly. Beyond that, however, the woman is a mystery to me. Oh, apart from the fact that she shares her name with a popular lighting fixture from the swinging sixties!

Most of her roles were tiny and often uncredited. Her first part seems to have been as 'Girl in Shower' in Alessandro Blasetti's Io, io, io... e gli altri (65), but after that she started popping up all over the place. She has a tiny part as one of the nubile female assassins in Deadlier than the Male, and appeared in other Eurospy films like The Big Blackout (Perry Grant, agente di ferro, 66) and Nazi SS (Borman, 66). One of her more prominent performances at this time - in terms of press coverage at any rate - was in Franco Prosperi's The Professional Killer (Tecnica di un omicidio, 66), which garnered a considerable amount of press coverage in publications like the UK Continental Film Review (which featured several pictures of Ms. Swan and her co-star, Franco Nero).

In 1968, she played the title role in Ruggero Deodata's Gungala la pantera nuda, one of the first of the rather peculiar 'Jungle Girl' films that became briefly popular. Carrying on in the same vein, she was the female lead in a couple of Manuel Cano films, King of the Jungle (Tarzán en la gruta del oro, 70) and Tarzan and the Treasure of the Emerald Cave (Tarzán y el arco iris, 72). The shooting of the former, in Florida, was marred by an accident in which Kitty and her co-star Steve Hawkes were badly burned - they were tied to wooden stakes when some gasoline soaked leaves caught fire - causing them to spend some months in hospital receiving skin grafts.

Unfortunately, these turned out to be the last appearances that I have been able to dig up for her. If anybody knows anything more about the elusive Ms. Svanholm, please get in touch!

ONE TO WATCH

Gungala la pantera nuda. If you can find it that is.