Sad news. The star of the Russ Meyer exploitation classic
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Tura Satana passed away on February 4 from heart failure in Reno Nevada. Those unfamiliar with the film, have probably seen the iconic image of the amazonian Satana wrestling a man to the ground in the famous shot below. Playing Varla, the homicidal leader of a trio of violent go-go girls who rome the desert wrestling men to death and trying to rob a wealthy old man, Satana is forever immortalized in the annals of popular culture for her role in Meyer's 1965 cult classic.
Satana was the Japanese born daughter of a silent actor of Japanese and Filipino decent and a circus performer of Cheyenne and Scots-Irish decent, contributing to her exotic appearance. Her childhood growing up in Chicago was very difficult. At the age of nine she was gang raped and the perpetrators apparently walked free due to a crocked judge. After her attack young Tura started learning judo and aikido to protect herself. She also claimed that she used her martial art skills to enact her own form a revenge on her attackers. While spending her early teen years in reform school and joining a biker gang, Tura married at the age of thirteen (arranged by her parents and the parents of the 17 year-old she married). At the same age of thirteen she went to Los Angeles where she became a failed Blues singer and a secretly under aged bathing suit and sometimes nude model (she modelled for silent film star Harold Lloyd who suggested that she become a film actress).
Setana eventually moved back to Chicago where she became a very successful burlesque dancer. She began touring with some of the biggest names in the burlesque world. She began getting bit parts in various television shows and movies and was cast in
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! i 1965.
While Meyer is quoted as saying that she was the main reason that the film the cult success that it has become, he never cast the buxom Satana in another one of his films. Her performing career had winded down by the mid-seventies and she ended up working in a couple of public service jobs until she married a police officer in 1981. In the years leading up to her death she had become a popular fixture at various comic and fan conventions.
Interestingly, Satana was a former girlfriend of Elvis Presley who proposed to her during their courtship. While she said no to the king she kept the ring he gave her. Tura Satana knew how to kick some ass.
