Veronica Carlson  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Veronica Carlson (1944 – 2022) was a British actress who was known for her roles in Hammer horror films. She is on the cover of Midi Minuit Fantastique 21 (1970) showing her in a publicity still in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968).

Life and career

Born in Yorkshire, England, as Veronica Mary Glazer, Carlson spent most of her childhood in West Germany where her father was stationed. She attended the Thetford Girls' School and later the High Wycombe College of Art and Technology, where she studied art and participated in college amateur productions. In her mid-twenties, Carlson played a few minor parts in films and television programmes.

James Carreras, the head of Hammer Films, saw one of her photographs in a newspaper and offered her a role opposite Christopher Lee in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968). She starred in two further Hammer Horror films, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) and The Horror of Frankenstein (1970). She also appeared in the Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) episode "The Ghost Who Saved the Bank at Monte Carlo" in 1969, an episode of The Saint ("The Man who Gambled with Life") with Roger Moore, and an episode of Department S ("The Double Death of Charlie Crippen").

Carlson was one of the four main characters in the TV thriller series Spyder's Web (1972), along with Anthony Ainley, Roger Lloyd-Pack, and Patricia Cutts. She had a small role in a 1975 episode of Public Eye playing Ingrid, the German girlfriend of Knaggs, a wanted bankrobber/gangster, played by Ray Lonnen.

Carlson went into semi-retirement after marrying and moving to the United States. In later life she lived in South Carolina, with her husband and three children, where she worked as a professional painter. She emerged from a 24 year retirement to star in the 2019 film House of the Gorgon, alongside fellow Hammer film stars Caroline Munro, Martine Beswick, and Christopher Neame.

Carlson died on 27 February 2022, at the age of 77.

Filmography