Pilar Seurat

Pilar Seurat was an exotic beauty of Filipino descent who enjoyed a decade-long acting career in films and on television in America during the 1960s. Born Rita Hernandez in Manila in 1938, she was trained as an actress and dancer, and after arriving in Hollywood at the end of the 1950s, she began getting roles on a wide variety of television shows, as well as in a handful of movies, usually playing Asian characters. Seurat's youth and her good looks were also exploited in films such as Seven Women From Hell and Battle at Bloody Beach, both released in 1961. That same year, she gave a gripping performance in the best role of her entire career, as Louisa Escalante, the sister of the blind murder victim, in John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages. Most of Seurat's work was confined to television, however, where she played guest-starring roles in series such as Adventures in Paradise (which exploited her dancing ability in one episode, "Blueprint for Paradise"), Bonanza, Naked City, The Wild Wild West, The High Chaparral, The Fugitive, The F.B.I., The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Daniel Boone, Hawaii Five-O, and Star Trek ("Wolf in the Fold"), as well as a handful of TV movies, among them Loss of Innocence. Seurat married writer/producer Don Devlin. Their son is Dean Devlin, the producer of such hit thrillers as Universal Soldier and Godzilla, and the blockbuster Independence Day. The two divorced in the mid-'60s, and Seurat gave up acting after marrying teacher/writer Don Cerveris, whom she divorced in the early '80s. She died of cancer in 2001.

~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide