The Amedee Chabot

Dedicated to three actresses of 1960s Mexican cinema: Amedee Chabot. This page will be updated with additional information and photos as often as possible, so check back frequently. Comments and assistance welcome.

n the long history of Mexican cinema, the 1960s stand out as the only decade in which the industry actively sought out foreign, non-Latin performers. Among those actors and actresses "imported" during this decade were Boris Karloff, John Carradine, Cameron Mitchell, June Wilkinson, Martha Hyer, Nick Adams, Jeffery Hunter, Glenn Ford, Lana Turner, Troy Donahue, Slim Pickens, and Robert Conrad, some appearing in co-productions, others in purely Mexican films.

lso in this group were three young women: Amedee Chabot, Elizabeth Campbell, and Christa Linder. Their careers are similar in some ways, different in others. Chabot and Linder were both beauty queens, and had appeared in movies in other countries before coming to Mexico. Elizabeth Campbell was the first to arrive, but made the fewest movies (16) in an 8-year span; Chabot appeared in 23 Mexican features in three years; Linder's film career was the longest, spanning 16 years and more than 30 pictures made in various countries, but she only concentrated her efforts in Mexico between 1968-72. All three were generally cast as gringas, stereotyped as sexy outsiders.

ow did they wind up in Mexico? Where are they now? Hopefully, as time goes by some of these questions will be answered (perhaps by you). This page is an introduction to the careers of these three sex symbols, whose presence graced so many Mexican movies of that wild decade, the Sixties.

Amedee Chabot

medee Chabot (she was frequently billed as "Amadee Chabot" or "Amedée Chabot" in Mexico) was born in Chicago in 1945. Sometime later, she moved to Northridge, California, and in 1962 was chosen "Miss California." She participated in the "Miss U.S.A." contest and on 22 September 1962, in Huntington, West Virginia, won the crown. Amedee went on to represent the United States in the "Miss World" contest that year in London, and made it to the finals of that competition, held in November. Later in 1962, Chabot was part of Bob Hope's annual Christmas tour of military bases, visiting Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Guam. Others on the tour were Lana Turner, Janis Paige, Anita Bryant, and Hope stalwarts Jerry Colonna and the Les Brown Band of Renown.

n 1963, the blonde, blue-eyed Chabot made her debut in Hollywood, appearing in two episodes of "The Beverly Hillbillies." She followed this (well, we don't really know the exact order of production) with small parts in three pictures, two of them youth-oriented movies (For Those Who Think Young and Muscle Beach Party), plus a biography of bordello owner Polly Adler (A House is Not a Home), in which Amedee was one of Adler's prostitutes (her co-workers included newcomers Raquel Welch and Edy Williams). In 1965 and 1966 she had minor roles in at least two additional pictures, one starring Jerry Lewis (Three on a Couch) and a "Matt Helm" adventure spoof with Dean Martin (Murderers' Row). Her final Hollywood effort came in 1967 when she played a lovely gnome in the Disney fantasy The Gnome-Mobile.

medee Chabot's first Mexican film was shot in May 1966, the Santo-Jorge Rivero spy adventure El tesoro de Moctezuma, in which she had the female lead as Rivero's love interest, an Interpol agent. Ironically, Elizabeth Campbell had been featured in Operación 67, which Tesoro was a sequel to. Bañame mi amor, shot in the later summer of 1966, teamed Chabot with the Texas-born Emily Cranz, an actress and dancer who had been working in Mexico for a number of years. Amedee's final film of 1966 was Autopsia de un fantasma, which starred three former Hollywood "names": Basil Rathbone (his last film), John Carradine, and Cameron Mitchell.

hat brought Amedee Chabot to Mexico? At this point, we don't know. However, it was undoubtedly a good career move for her. After playing bit roles in routine Hollywood pictures, she was given substantial parts in Mexico, and work was plentiful: Chabot acted in 10 features in 1967 and 10 more in 1968, even though her dialogue was virtually always dubbed. [In Operación Carambola Chabot's real voice can be heard in one scene; otherwise, although in many of her pictures she seems to have been speaking her lines in Spanish during filming--based on the movements of her lips--her voice was over-dubbed by others]

habot's Mexican movies were mostly comedies, with a number of action films and Westerns in the mix. Her most "serious" picture was Narda o el verano, basically a three-person drama with Chabot as the romantic interest for Enrique Alvarez Félix and Héctor Bonilla.

owever, in 1969 Amedee Chabot dropped out of films. On 10 January 1971, the "Corte!" column by Ricardo Ferete in Excelsior indicated: "Amadee Chabot writes from Hawaii and says she will return to Mexico to resume her film career. The statuesque American [estadounidense] blonde was converted into a star here, but inexplicably vanished from the scene..." A followup piece on 5 March 1971 read: "Amadee Chabot prepares her return to show business after a brief absence. She is an actress but it isn't unusual that she has decided to give us a surprise as a singer." However, this comeback apparently never occurred.

Amedee Chabot Filmography and Photos