Two of the most enduring myths in the mythmakers' paradise of Hollywood hold that every star should be discovered by accident and that any girl who gets typecast as a scatterbrain is really an intellectual. Pamela Tiffin in each instance happens to be the exception that proves that myths aren't always untrue. On a Thanksgiving trip to Hollywood in 1960, Pamela took a tour of the Paramount Studios with friends, was approached in the commissary by lieutenants of producer Hal Wallis and that afternoon found herself reading for the role of Nellie in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke. She got the part, of course, and within the year had finished work on two more films---Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three and 20th Century-Fox' State Fair. And she got the Hollywood superbuild-up: "Pamela is the greatest film discovery since Audrey Hepburn," said Wilder. "She learns so quickly, I can't understand why she isn't on the Supreme Court bench." None of her eight subsequent American films revealed Pamela's acknowledged braininess, though not all were mindless: Besides such forgettable beach-and-surf epics as For Those Who Think Young and The Lively Set, she also appeared in The Hallelujah Trail with Burt Lancaster and in Harper with Paul Newman. Now 26, a veteran of art-history courses at Columbia and language courses at Berlitz---she's fluent in French, Italian and Spanish---Pamela has spent the past few years filming in Rome. For Kiss the Other Sheik, in which she became the first American actress to play opposite Marcello Mastroianni, Pamela reluctantly bleached her brunette locks---but loved the results: "Go blonde, gain weight and lose your inhibitions," she told her fans through a reporter soon after the change. Herewith, then, the uninhibited Pamela.
