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Nancy Kovack

Nancy Kovack's acting career was short-lived for an unusual reason: not scandal, or drugs, or unpopularity, but rather, simply and sweetly, love. After only a decade of film and TV roles, Kovack formed a lasting relationship with celebrated conductor Zubin Mehta and decided to focus her life on her marriage. Even in her few years as an entertainer, though, she made an indelible mark. Novack is perhaps most recognized as Medea, the spurned (and vengeful) sorceress in 1963's "Jason and the Argonauts," a stop-motion film about the mythical quest for the Golden Fleece (though Jason's legendary abandonment of Medea is omitted from the movie, ensuring that his character stays in the good graces of theatergoing audiences). That same year, Novack played another romantic interest who is not so kindly spared from an unfortunate on-screen fate; in "Diary of a Madman," she portrayed the avaricious Odette Mallotte, whose gold-digging gets her in over her head with a magistrate possessed by an evil spirit. Years later, Kovack played a wife in another terrifying situation: fear that her astronaut husband might not return from his mission aboard a space station. Real-life astronaut Jim Lovell took his own wife to see the film "Marooned" less than a year before he went into space, and the viewing purportedly added to her anxiety about the possibility of his experiencing a similar disaster (as he indeed would, on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission to the Moon).