Publication: Los Angeles Daily News · CC BY 4.0

Susan Cabot, born Harriet Pearl Shapiro, worked steadily through the 1950s in westerns and then in Roger Corman's low-budget features, including the cult horror film The Wasp Woman, before largely withdrawing from public life. Her final decades were marked by severe mental illness, and in 1986 her son, who had dwarfism and pituitary complications from an experimental growth-hormone treatment she had sought for him, killed her in their Los Angeles home; he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.