Virginia Vincent

Hot Take: when you are 95, your estate does not have to disclose a cause of death and it’s weird that IMDb doesn’t just assume you’ve died of being 95. I suppose they can’t, in a way. I can, because I don’t consider these pieces to be real journalism, just poking around and sharing interesting details I learn, or expressing fondness for obscure TV shows the average person has never heard of and telling you how great someone was on them. But IMDb is used as a source—see, for example, that I use them as a source—and therefore has to have something approaching journalistic standards, even if I routinely complain about things they’re doing wrong.

Honestly, Vincent is one of those people I could quite easily put in my October lineup. She’s probably best known for The Hills Have Eyes, a movie I myself have not seen. Failing that, she’s fifth-billed in The Return of Dracula; if I’ve seen that, it’s been ages. She was also in a 1984 made-for-TV movie called Invitation to Hell, with Robert Urich, Joanna Cassidy, and Soleil Moon Frye. Actually, the cast on that last one is astounding even if I fully expect to encounter the movie itself on RiffTrax one of these days. It seems likely to me that her casting on each successive one was as a reference to the one before it; horror does seem to do that sort of thing.

But of course that’s not where I think of her. Nor is being fifteenth-billed in Change of Habit, speaking of horror. I have seen that movie, though it’s been many years. It’s the last movie Elvis made. He plays an inner-city doctor dealing with three nuns, the leader of whom is Mary Tyler Moore. It is exactly as high quality as you’d expect from that summary. I don’t remember what her character does, because she’s not the black nun using the kind of slang you get in this sort of movie or the autistic child who is believed to be the first explicitly autistic character in film. It’s really easy for a woman like Vincent to get lost in that shuffle.

On the other hand, she did three episodes of Perry Mason. (And one of Ironside, as is so often the case for multiple-episode Perry Mason guests.) On her first appearance, she was Perry’s client, a plain young woman whose lover allegedly betrayed her for a prettier, richer relative. In fact all three of her episodes involved betrayal in love, but really, that’s just Perry Mason for you. Her first episode establishes her as prettier than she thinks she is in one of those tedious “you just needed to do your hair differently” makeovers at the end, but I suppose there are at least a few people who are prettier than they think they are.

In more obscure stuff, she also did two episodes of Emergency! I will never understand why this show isn’t watched more often, because I frankly adore it. Her first episode here has more screentime, too; she plays a woman who fakes a heart attack every time she’s fighting with her husband in order to win him to her side. You wouldn’t think that would work more than once, and arguably it does not, but that’s an Emergency! plot for you. I said I loved the show. I never said it makes sense.