Ninety years of Hammer Horror

Image: Valerie Leon in Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb; IMDb

Valerie Leon talks about Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb at the Chiswick In Film Festival

Hammer Films celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. Sky TV will be marking it with a documentary made by Deep Fusion Films: Hammer: Legends and Monsters, narrated by Charles Dance, which will be available to watch in November.

Chiswick In Film Festival will be celebrating it with a screening of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), as the Mummy in question, the evil Egyptian Queen Tera, lives amongst us.

Valerie Leon, who played both the role of the Mummy and that of the daughter of the English professor who disinterred her, is a long-term Chiswick resident. She will be talking about the film at Chiswick Cinema on Sunday 17 November and she spoke to The Chiswick Calendar about her career in film.

Image: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb; IMDb

From the chorus line to the Carry On films

Valerie started out as a trainee fashion buyer at Harrods, but although she was “incredibly shy”, she was stage-struck from an early age, she told me. The actor Eleanor Bron was a family friend, who introduced Valerie to her singing teacher, who in turn suggested she read The Stage newspaper for opportunities.

Valerie auditioned for a part in The Belle of New York and got it.

“I left a perfectly respectable job and became a chorus girl, in 1966. The show folded after six weeks, and there I was, on the dole, but determined to pursue a career in show business. I was really lucky to have worked on the three main British film series – the Bond films, Carry On and Hammer Horror.”

Image: Valerie with mementoes of her career in her living room

Her next opportunity was a stint in the chorus line of a pantomime, Aladdin, from which she progressed to a small speaking part in Funny Girl with Barbara Streisand in the West End. That too only lasted a short while, as it soon became evident that Streisand was pregnant, but by then Valerie had an equity card and an agent.

“My agent got me into TV and I did loads of TV – The Avengers, Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, Up Pompeii, The Des O’Connor Show – I worked with Morcambe and Wise, that was nice.”

She then started working on the Carry On films.

“Charlie Hawtrey used to come in every day to the studio with his newspaper, his cigarettes, his sandwiches and a drink ready for the break. Kenny Williams would hide them. When we stopped, Charlie would come out and looked for them and there would be enormous ructions.

“Hattie Jacques was lovely; she was a very warm, lovely person.

“Sid James was a lovely man. He had this reputation for being lascivious, because that was his character, but he wasn’t like that at all. I remember there was some event when all the bigwigs came in and Sid rescued this young girl from a situation which was becoming quite difficult for her.”

Images: Valerie Leon stopping the traffic, posing as Tera the Egyptian Queen; Valerie as Margaret, the Professor’s daughter, looking uncannily like the Egyptian Queen; photographs courtesy of IMDb

For all her fabulous looks, which literally stopped traffic, Valerie said she didn’t have too much trouble with casting couch scenarios.

“Because I was so cripplingly shy, I just had this barrier around me. I think they thought I was rather cold and aloof.”

She appeared in six Carry On films in all: Carry On Up the Khyber (1968), Carry On Camping (1969), Carry On Again Doctor (1969), Carry On Up the Jungle (1970), Carry On Matron (1972), Carry On Girls (1973).

Images: Posters from the Carry On and Bond franchises

Playing a Bond girl

During the Carry On years Valerie also had parts in films such as The Italian Job (1969) and No Sex Please, We’re British (1973). Later on she had roles in two Bond movies – The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Never Say Never Again (1983).

“Wasn’t I lucky to work with both Roger Moore and Sean Connery.”

She may have limited her career opportunities by telling Cubby Broccoli she didn’t want to be killed off. She played a hotel receptionist in The Spy Who Loved Me, with Roger Moore, which involved being flown out to Sardinia, to stay in the luxurious Calle di Volpe hotel.

For her second Bord film she played one of Sean Connery’s conquests. There was a bed scene, but all she really remembers of it was the hairiness of his chest!

To the generation which is now claiming their pension, she is also the face of the ‘Hi Karate’ adverts. Like the Joan Collins / Leonard Rossiter Cinzano ads, they entailed daft, funny story lines in which the bloke always comes off worse.

Images: Film posters for Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb; IMDb

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb

The opportunity to play a lead role came in 1971, with Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb.

I asked tentatively, was this her first lead role?

“First?! It was my only lead role!” she laughed. “It was cursed from start to finish.”

“I started filming with Peter Cushing, who was playing my father, the professor. We did a day’s filming and that evening he received a phone call to say his beloved wife Helen was very ill, and he had to leave the picture.”

Image: Valerie Leon with Peter Cushing; IMDb

“It was cursed from start to finish”

The actor Andrew Keir took over and they re-shot the sequences she had filmed with Peter Cushing.

“The second thing that happened was that a young man from the arts department was killed on his motorbike,” rather eerily, as that was the fate which befell Valerie’s fiancée in the film.

“The third thing was that the director Seth Holt died, five weeks into the six-week film schedule. He had the hiccups for a week, and we all thought it was very funny, but he and his wife had a dinner party and at the end of the evening he said to her ‘I’m going.’ and he died of a heart attack.

“I was devastated by Seth’s death. I really liked him.”

Michael Carreras, the producer, took over but there were huge problems with the production and in the end the film came out as a B movie, relegated by the loss of its star name.

(For younger readers, in the days when there were two films on the bill, the ‘B’ movie and the main feature, the B movie was the warm-up act, which Wikipedia rather unkindly describes as ‘a type of cheap, poorly made commercial motion picture.’)

Problems notwithstanding, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb has its place in the Hammer Horror cannon, which also includes such classics as The Curse of Frankenstein and The Quatermass Xperiment. Among the critics’ reviews, John Higgins of Starburst wrote:

‘It’s a darkly fun yarn – and another proud example of what can be achieved on a limited budget with talent..

Grant Watson of Fiction Machine agreed:

‘It does provide that combination of blood, violence, hammy acting, and low-level nudity that fans of Hammer tend to expect.’

Valerie Leon will be talking about Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and her career at the screening at Chiswick Cinema on Sunday 17 November at 5pm.

Book tickets: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb + Interview / Q&A with Barry Longford

See all the films in this year’s Chiswick In Film Festival here:

READ ALSO: Full line-up announced for Chiswick In Film Festival 2024

Our sponsors

The Chiswick In Film Festival is a collaboration between The Chiswick Calendar and Chiswick Cinema, with film industry professionals Andrea Carnevali and Rob Sprackling. We would not be able to bring you this cinematic feast in this way without the support of our sponsor.

Chiswick in Film Festival 2024 is kindly sponsored by The London Bath Co. whose shop is on Chiswick High Road and who offer superior, fully fitted bathrooms and kitchens from design to installation.

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