Marilyn Eastman

American actress (1933–2021)

Marilyn Eastman played Helen Cooper. She was born in Iowa in 1933 and came to Pittsburgh, where she was a regular on local radio and became Karl Hardman's partner at Hardman Associates on Smithfield Street - the firm the print's own card names among the facilities the film was produced through, and whose newsroom set is its real office.

Her work on the picture went well past the part. She made the sound effects with Hardman, worked on make-up and props, and had a hand in editing the screenplay; she also appears, unrecognisable, as the ghoul eating insects outside the farmhouse. In January 1966, two years before the film, she and Hardman co-produced a morning show on WRYT, "The Tea House with Jason Flake", with the broadcaster Charles Craig - who turns up in this cast as the television newscaster. She and Hardman later wrote and produced a comedy album together and he directed her as Martha in a Pittsburgh staging of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1978. She died in 2021.