Stella Stevens, Who Starred in ‘The Nutty Professor,’ ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ Dies at 84

variety.com:

Carmel Dagan Stella Stevens, who starred with Elvis Presley in “Girls! Girls! Girls!” and with Jerry Lewis in “The Nutty Professor” as well as in disaster film “The Poseidon Adventure,” died Friday in Los Angeles.

A rep said she died of a long-term illness. She was 84.“Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) was one of the more generic Elvis films— there wasn’t all that much for Stevens to do — but Variety was keen on her performance in 1963’s “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” starring Glenn Ford and Shirley Jones in the story of a widower who’s romantically interested in one woman while his son wants him to marry another: “Stella Stevens comes on like gangbusters in her enactment of a brainy but inhibited doll from Montana.

It’s a sizzling comedy performance of a kook.” In “The Nutty Professor” (1963) or any other Jerry Lewis film, one might expect the female lead to blend into the background, but the New York Times praised her: “It’s about a shy gargoyle of a college chemist who brews a miracle mixture, becomes a bland Casanova (periodically) and finally reverts to his shy original self and a pert, smitten blonde student, neatly played by Stella Stevens.” Assessing 1966’s “The Silencers,” the first of the Matt Helm spy spoofs, in a 2010 review, the Watching the Detectives website said: “The cast is also amusing to watch, with Dean Martin excelling in the part of the reluctant hero … and Stella Stevens as the clumsiest femme fatale to ever bumble her way across the screen.”In “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows” (1968), a sequel to keen Rosalind Russell-as-nun comedy “The Trouble With Angels,” Stevens played a hip, streetwise nun who spars with Russell’s not-to-be-trifled-with character, the Mother Superior of a girls’