Allison Hayes

Biography

Born Mary Jane Hayes in Charleston, West Virginia, on March 6, 1930, Allison Hayes became Miss Washington D.C. in 1949. Hayes took jobs in early television in Washington before moving to California in 1953 to begin an acting career.

Allison Hayes acted in a string of movies from 1954 to 1965. One of her earliest films was the Universal series entry Francis Joins the WACS (1954, with Mamie Van Doren).  In addition, Hayes made many guest appearances on popular TV programs in the 1950s and 1960s. She worked with her friend Raymond Burr numerous times on the TV series Perry Mason.

Allison Hayes in The Unearthly

After 1960, Hayes began taking on more television roles and made films only sporadically

thereafter.

In her last film, Ms. Hayes appeared alongside Elvis Presley in Tickle Me (1965, with Merry Anders and Julie Adams). Hayes is featured in the beginning of Tickle Me as a drunken bar patron who lunges at Elvis as he performs. Viewers will note that she looks thin and gaunt in this, her only scene in the film. For years, Hayes had taken a doctor-prescribed calcium supplement with extreme levels of lead---so extreme that she contracted lead poisoning. After the onset of her illness in the mid 1960s, she was too ill to work and was housebound for long periods of time. Hayes died of her illness in 1977 at age 47.

MSTied Movies

• The Crawling Hand

• The Unearthly

• Gunslinger

• The Undead

Notes

• Clips of Ms. Hayes' appearance in the film Attack of the 50-Foot Woman were used in the film Ruby, which became a Rifftrax presentation in 2016.