Actress Gayle Hunnicutt, best known for playing Vanessa Beaumont in the soap opera Dallas, died Aug. 31 in a London hospital. She was 80.
Her cause of death was an unspecified illness, according to her former husband, journalist Simon Jenkins, who confirmed her passing to The Washington Post.
Hunnicutt was a Texas-born beauty who made her name playing femme fatales in television series and movies during the 1960s. She got her start in acting while studying English and theater arts at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she was discovered in a local stage play by a Warner Brothers agent. In 1966, she landed her first television role ever in Mister Roberts, and later that same year, had a supporting role in the Nancy Sinatra film The Wild Angels.
Often cast for her beauty in the early days of her career, Hunnicutt moved to the U.K. with her new husband, actor David Hemmings, in search of more serious roles.
“In California I was going down the path of being built up on my looks,” she said in 1974, per The Washington Post. “I feel I was very lucky to escape.”
She and Hemmings famously met at a party at actor Peter Lawford‘s home in Santa Monica. Though he soon began leading a public affair with his co-star Samantha Eggar, the actors remained married and continued collaborating on multiple projects until they divorced in the mid-1970s.
But Hunnicutt continued living in the U.K., where her career and social life thrived. She enjoyed acting onstage and starred in multiple BBC historical dramas including The Golden Bowl and Fall of Eagles. She also got married to Jenkins, with whom she shares a son; the couple were married until 2000.
Hunnicutt did not return to the United States until almost two decades later when she starred in the hit soap opera Dallas, in which she played Englishwoman Vanessa Beaumont. Her last credited acting role was in the 1999 series CI5: The New Professionals.
The actress also published two books during her lifetime. In 1984, she wrote Health and Beauty in Motherhood. She later edited and published a collection of letters, titled Dearest Virginia, that her father sent her mother while stationed in the South Pacific during World War II.
Hunnicutt is survived by her two sons, Edward Jenkins and Band of Brothers actor Nolan Hemmings, and five grandchildren.