Old timey beauty Norma Marla only ever appeared in two feature films throughout her entire acting career but she made a pretty big impression nonetheless. Her debut performance was in the comedy pastiche The Ugly Duckling (1959), which was a play on the classic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s hard to imagine Norma appearing in anything with the word “ugly” in the title, but the late ‘50s were a very different time. Curiously enough, the only other film she appeared in was also itself a retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde story: Terence Fisher’s Hammer B-movie The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). In the film, she plays Maria, who does a long, very sexy dance with a snake in front of a big audience, all in a surprisingly skimpy and revealing outfit for the time period. Later she hooks up with Hyde and barely manages to hyde her sideboob as she lies on her stomach in bed the morning after.
