Robyn Hilton was a 33 year-old nude model when Mel Brooks cast her as his secretary in the 1974 classic "Blazing Saddles". Hilton hoped her spectacular figure and the pedigree of being in a Brooks film would jump-start her career, but it never happened. She gravitated into the porn industry before retiring in 1977 and dropping out of sight. There was some consolation, however. In 1974, she was voted the prestigious "Hottest Body Ever" award from Boobtacular Digest! (We have a complete run of the magazine on a shelf next to The New England Journal of Medicine). Wherever you are, Robyn, thanks for the mammaries!
Although movie fans continue to believe the mistaken myth that Lee Van Cleef played "The Ugly" in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", in reality that part was immortalized by Eli Wallach. Van Cleef actually played "The Bad" - a character nicknamed Angel Eyes. Prior to Sergio Leone's masterpiece, he had been inevitably cast as villains. In the wake of the film's success, however, he was generall cast as the heroic leading man. Here, the New Jersey-born western icon does a half-Monty in the spaghetti western "Death Rides a Horse", one of many Leone-inspired horse operas made in the 1960s and 1970s.