Anjanette Comer, the 1960s ingenue who had leading roles in The Loved One, The Appaloosa and The Baby but passed on two major starring opportunities that could have transformed her career, has died. She was 86.

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Comer died May 28 at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center, according to a death certificate filed with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health that was obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. She battled leukemia and had heart issues.

Comer had chances to star opposite Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park and alongside Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, but she declined to work in both landmark 1967 releases, and Jane Fonda and Faye Dunaway, respectively, were the ones who would ultimately benefit.

In a 1981 interview with UPI’s Vernon Scott, Comer said she rejected both jobs because she “had this very important relationship with a man, an actor, who didn’t want me to work in movies. At that time I was young and naive.” She added that she “hated her career.”

The green-eyed Comer, who came from a small town in Texas, also didn’t do herself any favors when she backpedaled on starring with Michael Caine in Funeral in Berlin (1966), a sequel to the Harry Palmer spy thriller The Ipcress File. Unknown to producer Harry Saltzman, she left Germany during filming to be with her boyfriend on weekends and was replaced by Eva Renzi.

“I had a reputation for being crazy because I’d walked out on Funeral in Berlin,” Comer said. “And I guess I was crazy. You see, I didn’t build my career slowly like most successful actresses do. After a couple of TV appearances, I became an instant movie star. I didn’t know how to handle it all emotionally.”

Comer was born on Aug. 7, 1939, in Dawson, Texas. She attended Dawson High School, was voted queen of the Corsicana Fair and Rodeo at age 16 and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, where she was spotted by agent Byron Raphael and signed.

She landed on episodes of My Three Sons and The Donna Reed Show in 1962, then guest-starred the next year on Gunsmoke, Ben Casey and the 90-minute ABC drama Arrest and Trial, which landed her a supporting actress Emmy nomination for her performance as a hooker.

Comer appeared on the two-part 1964 episode of the MGM-NBC series Dr. Kildare famous for giving viewers a look at Yvette Mimieux‘s navel, then made her big-screen debut for the studio that year in Delbert Mann’s Quick, Before It Melts, playing a flight attendant in the comedy that starred George Maharis and Robert Morse.

When she was invited to audition for the role of make-up mortician Aimee Thanatogenous in Tony Richardson’s funeral-industry satire The Loved One (1965), she thought, “How ridiculous — me and 49 others. So I didn’t go,” she told TV Guide in 1964.

“Later it was arranged for me to meet Mr. Richardson personally. We talked about the role, and the next day he called to say I had the part.”

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She starred with Morse, whose character has come to bury his uncle, in that film, too, and delivered one of the movie’s most famous lines: “What did you have in mind? Inhumement, entombment, inurnment, immurement?  Some people just lately have preferred ensarcophagusment. It’s very individual.”

In his review of The Loved One for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote that “Anjanette Comer does nicely as the honey-voiced, nitwit girl, one of the Whispering Glades’ comforters, with whom the hero inconceivably falls in love.”

She starred as a backstabbing heroine with Marlon Brando and John Saxon in Sidney J. Furie’s The Appaloosa (1966) and played another Mexican woman in Guns for San Sebastian (1968). In between, she appeared with Robert Wagner and Jill St. John in Banning (1967).

Her next films, In Enemy Country (1968), Rabbit, Run (1970) and The Firechasers (1971), co-starring Tony Franciosa, James Caan and Chad Everett, respectively, didn’t create much heat, but her fans were delighted to see her portray an earnest social worker opposite Ruth Roman in the bizarre horror film The Baby (1973).

Marianna Hill, who also starred in The Baby, praised Comer’s work in a 2016 interview with Shaun Chang for his Hill Place blog. “She would tell me, ‘I’m going to create an inner life and this and that for my character,’” she recalled. “I would listen to her and I would create these secret choices for my character [as well].”

Comer’s résumé included the Tony Curtis-starring Lepke (1975), Fire Sale (1977), Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath (1995) and A Bird of the Air (2011) and TV guest-starring stints on Bonanza, Mod Squad, Love, American Style, Mannix, Columbo, Jake and the Fatman, The Blue Knight, Hotel and The Practice.

The romance that led Comer to lose focus on her career in the ’60s never came to anything, but she was married to author, screenwriter and director Robert Klane (Weekend at Bernie’s, Where’s Poppa?, Fire Sale, Thank God It’s Friday) from 1976 until their 1983 divorce.

Survivors include her older sister, Jerra Tillman, who when contacted did not want to comment on Comer’s death.

Comer told UPI’s Scott in that 1981 interview that she was “absolutely certain I will get back to the high point of my career. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. I have to believe that so other people will believe it, too.”

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